•<«-.« ■ ■ 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 



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PUERTA DEL SOL — GATE OF THE SUN — TOLEDO 



FAMILIAR 
SPANISH TRAVELS 



W 



rr>)S h o 



WELLS 



ILLUSTRATED 




HARPER 6- BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

M C M XI I I 



.Hi 



COPYRIGHT. 1913. 



iRPER & BROTHERS 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
PUBLISHED OCTOBER. 1813 



** 



<<-<.■ 



TO 
M. H 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. Autobiographical Approaches 1 

II. San Sebastian and Beautiful Biscay 8 

III. Burgos and the Bitter Cold of Burgos ... 31 

IV. The Variety of Valladolid 53 

V. Phases of Madrid 81 

VI. A Night and Day in Toledo 124 

VII. The Great Gridiron of St. Lawrence .... 150 

VIII. Cordova and the Way There 165 

IX. First Days in Seville 196 

X. Sevillian Aspects and Incidents 226 

XI. To and in Granada 267 

XII. The Surprises of Ronda 296 

XIII. Algeciras and Tarifa 311 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PUERTA DEL SOL — GATE OF THE SUN — TOLEDO .... Frontispiece \/ 
THE CASINO, SAN SEBASTIAN, LOOKS OUT UPON THE 

CURVING CONCHA AND THE BLUE BAY Facing p. 12 " 

THE SEA SWEEPS INLAND IN A CIRCLE OF BLUE, TO FORM 

THE ENTRANCE TO THE HARBOR, SAN SEBASTIAN . ' ' 18 V 
GROUPS OF WOMEN ON THEIR KNEES BEATING CLOTHES 

IN THE WATER " 32 l 

THE IRON-GRAY BULK OF THE CATHEDRAL REARS ITSELF 

FROM CLUSTERING WALLS AND ROOFS " 34 '" 

THE TOMB OF DONNA MARIA MANUEL " 42"' 

A BURGOS STREET " 48 ^ 

A STREET LEADING TO THE CATHEDRAL " 62 ^ 

THE UNIVERSITY OF VALLADOLID " 66 ^ 

CHURCH OF SAN PABLO " 70 

THE HOUSE IN WHICH PHILIP II. WAS BORN .... " 74* 

PUERTA DEL SOL, MADRID " 88 

THE BULL-RING, MADRID " 92 

GUARD-MOUNT IN THE PLAZA DE ARMAS, ROYAL PALACE, 

MADRID " 114 

RICHES OF GRAY ROOF AND WHITE WALL MARK ITS IN- 

SURPASSABLE ANTIQUITY " 130 * 

AN ANCIENT CORNER OF THE CITY M 138 v 

THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE YELLOW TAGUS " 142 V 

THE TOWN AND MONASTERY OF ESCORIAL " 154 . 

THE PANTHEON OF THE KINGS AND QUEENS OF SPAIN, 

UNDER THE HIGH ALTAR OF THE CHURCH, ESCORIAL ** 160 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

THE ANCIENT CITY OF CORDOVA 

THE BELL-TOWER OF THE GREAT MOSQUE, CORDOVA 

GATEWAY OF THE BRIDGE, CORDOVA 

IN ATTITUDES OF SILENT DEVOTION 

THE CATHEDRAL AND TOWER OF THE GIRALDA . . . . 
ANCIENT ROMAN COLUMNS LIFTING ALOFT THE FIGURES 

OF HERCULES AND CAESAR 

GARDENS OF THE ALCAZAR 

THE COURT OF FLAGS AND TOWER OF THE GIRALDA . . 
THE GATE OF JUSTICE. PRINCIPAL ENTRANCE TO THE 

ALHAMBRA 

THE COURT OF THE LIONS 

LOOKING NORTHWEST FROM THE GENERALIFE OVER 

GRANADA 

LOOKING ACROSS THE NEW BRIDGE (300 FEET HIGH) 

OVER THE GUADALAVIAR GORGE, RONDA . . . . 
VIEW OF ALGECIRAS 



Faa 



ng p. 180 

184 
190 
210 
214 

218 
230 
244 

274 

278 

290 

304 
312 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

I 

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPEOACHES 

As the train took its time and onrs in mounting the 
uplands toward Granada on the soft, but not too soft, 
evening of November 6, 1911, the air that came to me 
through the open window breathed as if from an au- 
tumnal night of the middle eighteen-fifties in a little 
village of northeastern Ohio. I was now going to see, 
for the first time, the city where so great a part of my 
life was then passed, and in this magical air the two 
epochs were blent in reciprocal association. The ques- 
tion of my present identity was a thing indifferent and 
apart; it did not matter who or where or when I was. 
Youth and age were at one with each other: the boy 
abiding in the old man, and the old man pensively will- 
ing to dwell for the enchanted moment in any vantage 
of the past which would give him shelter. 

In that dignified and deliberate Spanish train I was 
a man of seventy-four crossing the last barrier of hills 
that helped keep Granada from her conquerors, and at 
the same time I was a boy of seventeen in the little 
room under the stairs in a house now practically remoter 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

than the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through 
some Spanish story of the vanished kingdom of the 
Moors. The little room which had structurally ceased 
fifty years before from the house that ceased to be home 
even longer ago had returned to the world with me in 
it, and fitted perfectly into the first-class railway com- 
partment which my luxury had provided for it. From 
its window I saw through the car window the olive 
groves and white cottages of the Spanish peasants, and 
the American apple orchards and meadows stretching 
to the primeval woods that walled the drowsing village 
round. Then, as the night deepened with me at my 
book, the train slipped slowly from the hills, and the 
moon, leaving the Ohio village wholly in the dark, shone 
over the roofs and gardens of Granada, and I was no 
longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a man of 
seventy-four. 

I do not say the experience was so explicit as all 
this; no experience so mystical could be so explicit; 
and perhaps what was intimated to me in it was only 
that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader's 
company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had 
better be honest with him and own at the beginning 
that passion for Spanish things which was the ruling 
passion of my boyhood ; I had better confess that, how- 
ever unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a 
lover still, so that I never wished to escape from it, but 
must try to hide the fact whenever the real Spain fell 
below the ideal, however I might reason with my in- 
fatuation or try to scoff it away. It had once been so 
inextinguishable a part of me that the record of my 
journey must be more or less autobiographical; and 
though I should decently endeavor to keep my past out 
of it, perhaps I should not try very hard and should 

not alwavs succeed. 

2 



AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES 



Just when this passion began in me I should not 
be able to say ; but probably it was with my first read- 
ing of Don Quixote in the later eighteen-forties. I 
would then have been ten or twelve years old ; and, of 
course, I read that incomparable romance, not only 
greatest, but sole of its kind, in English. The purpose 
of some time reading it in Spanish and then the pur- 
pose of some time writing the author's life grew in 
me with my growing years so strongly that, though I 
have never yet done either and probably never shall, 
I should not despair of doing both if I lived to be a 
hundred. In the mean time my wandering steps had 
early chanced upon a Spanish grammar, and I had 
begun those inquiries in it which were based upon a 
total ignorance of English accidence. I do not remem- 
ber how I felt my way from it to such reading of the 
language as has endeared Spanish literature to me. It 
embraced something of everything: literary and polit- 
ical history, drama, poetry, fiction; but it never con- 
descended to the exigencies of common parlance. These 
exigencies did not exist for me in my dreams of seeing 
Spain which were not really expectations. It was not 
until half a century later, when my longing became a 
hope and then a purpose, that I foreboded the need of 
practicable Spanish. Then I invoked the help of a 
young professor, who came to me for an hour each day 
of a week in London and let me try to talk with him ; 
but even then I accumulated so little practicable Span- 
ish that my first hour, almost my first moment in Spain, 
exhausted my store. My professor was from Barcelona, 
but he beautifully lisped his cs and z's like any old 
Castilian, when he might have hissed them in the ac- 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

cent of his native Catalan ; and there is no telling how 
much I might have profited by his instruction if he had 
not been such a charming intelligence that I liked to 
talk with him of literature and philosophy and politics 
rather than the weather, or the cost of things, or the 
question of how long the train stopped and when it 
would start, or the dishes at table, or clothes at the 
tailor's, or the forms of greeting and parting. If he did 
not equip me with the useful colloquial phrases, the 
fault was mine; and the misfortune was doubly mine 
when from my old acquaintance with Italian (glib half- 
sister of the statelier Spanish) the Italian phrases would 
thrust forward as the equivalent of the English words 
I could not always think of. The truth is, then, that 
I was not perfect in my Spanish after quite six weeks 
in Spain; and if in the course of his travels with me 
the reader finds me flourishing Spanish idioms in his 
face he may safely attribute them less to my speaking 
than my reading knowledge : probably I never employed 
them in conversation. That reading was itself without 
order or system, and I am not sure but it had better 
been less than more. Yet who knows? The days, or 
the nights of the days, in the eighteen-fifties went 
quickly, as quickly as the years go now, and it would 
have all come to the present pass whether that blind 
devotion to an alien literature had cloistered my youth 
or not. 

I do not know how, with the merciful make I am 
of, I should then have cared so little, or else ignored so 
largely the cruelties I certainly knew that the Span- 
iards had practised in the conquests of Mexico and 
Peru. I knew of these things, and my heart was with 
the Incas and the Aztecs, and yet somehow I could not 
punish the Spaniards for their atrocious destruction of 
the only American civilizations. As nearly as I can 



AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES 

now say, I was of both sides, and wistful to reconcile 
them, though I do not see now how it could have been 
done; and in my later hopes for the softening of the 
human conditions I have found it hard to forgive 
Pizarro for the overthrow of the most perfectly social- 
ized state known to history. I scarcely realized the 
base ingratitude of the Spanish sovereigns to Columbus, 
and there were vast regions of history that I had not 
penetrated till long afterward in pursuit of Spanish 
perfidy and inhumanity, as in their monstrous misrule 
of Holland. When it came in those earlier days to a 
question of sides between the Spaniards and the Moors, 
as Washington Irving invited my boyhood to take it in 
his chronicle of the conquest of Granada, I experienced 
on a larger scale my difficulty in the case of the Mexi- 
cans and Peruvians. The case of these had been re- 
ported to me in the school-readers, but here, now, was 
an affair submitted to the mature judgment of a boy 
of twelve, and yet I felt as helpless as I was at ten. 
Will it be credited that at seventy-four I am still often 
in doubt which side I should have had win, though I 
used to fight on both? Since the matter was settled 
more than four hundred years ago, I will not give the 
reasons for my divided allegiance. They would hardly 
avail now to reverse the tragic fate of the Moors, and if 
I try I cannot altogether wish to reverse it. Whatever 
Spanish misrule has been since Islam was overthrown 
in Granada, it has been the error of law, and the rule 
of Islam at the best had always been the effect of per- 
sonal will, the caprice of despots high and low, the 
unstatuted sufferance of slaves, high and low. The 
gloomiest and crudest error of Inquisitional Spain was 
nobler, with its adoration of ideal womanhood, than the 
Mohammedan state with its sensual dreams of Paradise. 

I will not pretend (as I very well might, and as I 

5 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

perhaps ought) that I thought of these things, all or 
any, as our train began to slope rather more rapidly 
toward Granada, and to find its way under the rising 
moon over the storied Vega. I will as little pretend 
that my attitude toward Spain was ever that of the im- 
partial observer after I crossed the border of that en- 
chanted realm where we all have our castles. I have 
thought it best to be open with the reader here at the 
beginning, and I would not, if I could, deny him the 
pleasure of doubting my word or disabling my judg- 
ment at any point he likes. In return I shall only 
ask his patience when I strike too persistently the 
chord of autobiography. That chord is part of the 
harmony between the boy and the old man who made 
my Spanish journey together, and were always accus- 
ing themselves, the first of dreaming and the last of 
doddering: perhaps with equal justice. Is there really 
much difference between the two ? 



ii 



It was fully a month before that first night in 
Granada that I arrived in Spain after some sixty 
years' delay. During this period I had seen almost 
every other interesting country in Europe. I had 
lived five or six years in Italy; I had been several 
months in Germany ; and a fortnight in Holland ; I 
had sojourned often in Paris; I had come and gone a 
dozen times in England and lingered long each time; 
and yet I had never once visited the land of my de- 
votion. I had often wondered at this, it was so wholly 
involuntary, and I had sometimes suffered from the 
surprise of those who knew of my passion for Spain, 
and kept finding out my dereliction, alleging the Slid- 



AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES 

Express to Madrid as something that left me without 
excuse. The very summer before last I got so far on 
the way in London as to buy a Spanish phrase-book 
full of those inopportune conversations with landlords, 
tailors, ticket-sellers, and casual acquaintance or agree- 
able strangers. Yet I returned once more to America 
with my desire, which was turning into a duty, un- 
fulfilled; and when once more I sailed for Europe 
in 1911 it was more with foreboding of another fail- 
ure than a prescience of fruition in my inveterate 
longing. Even after that boldly decisive week of the 
professor in London I had my doubts and my self- 
doubts. There were delays at London, delays at Paris, 
delays at Tours; and when at last we crossed the 
Pyrenees and I found myself in Spain, it was with 
an incredulity which followed me throughout and 
lingered with me to the end. " Is this truly Spain, 
and am I actually there ?" the thing kept asking it- 
self; and it asks itself still, in terms that fit the ac- 
complished fact. 



II 

SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCx\Y 

Even at Iran, where we arrived in Spain from 
Bayonne, there began at once to be temperamental 
differences which ought to have wrought against my 
weird misgivings of my whereabouts. Only in Spain 
could a customs inspector have felt of one tray in our 
trunks and then passed them all with an air of such 
jaded aversion from an employ uncongenial to a gen- 
tleman. Perhaps he was also loath to attempt any 
inquiry in that Desperanto of French, English, and 
Spanish which raged around us; but the porter to 
whom we had fallen, while I hesitated at our carriage 
door whether I should summon him as Mozo or Usted, 
was master of that lingua franca and recovered us 
from the customs without question on our part, and 
understood everything we could not say. I like to 
think he was a Basque, because I like the Basques so 
much for no reason that I can think of. Their being 
always Carlists would certainly be no reason with me, 
for I was never a Carlist; and perhaps my liking is 
only a prejudice in their favor from the air of thrift 
and work which pervades their beautiful province, or 
is an effect of their language as I first saw it inscribed 
on the front of the Credit Lyonnais at Bayonne. It 
looked so beautifully regular, so scholarly, so Latin, 
so sister to both Spanish and Italian, so richly and 
musically voweled, and yet remained so impenetrable 
to the most daring surmise, that I conceived at 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 

onco a profound admiration for the race which could 
keep such a language to itself. When I remembered 
how blond, how red-blond our sinewy young porter 
was, I could not well help breveting him of that race, 
and honoring him because he could have read those 
words with the eyes that were so blue amid the general 
Spanish blackness of eyes. He imparted a quiet from 
his own calm to our nervousness, and if we had ap- 
pealed to him on the point I am sure he would have 
saved us from the error of breakfasting in the station 
restaurant at the deceitful tahle d'hote, though where 
else we should have breakfasted I do not know. 



One train left for San Sebastian while I was still 
lost in amaze that what I had taken into my mouth 
for fried egg should be inwardly fish and full of 
bones; but he quelled my anxiety with the assurance, 
which I somehow understood, that there would be 
another train soon. In the mean time there were most 
acceptable Spanish families all about, affably con- 
versing together, and freely admitting to their con- 
versation the children, who so publicly abound in Spain, 
and the nurses who do nothing to prevent their pub- 
licity. There were already the typical fat Spanish 
mothers and lean fathers, with the slender daughters, 
who, in the tradition of Spanish good-breeding, kept 
their black eyes to themselves, or only lent them to 
the spectators in furtive glances. Both older and 
younger ladies wore the scanty Egyptian skirt of 
Occidental civilization, lurking or perking in deep- 
drooping or high-raking hats, though already here and 
there was the mantilla, which would more and more 
prevail as we went southward ; older and younger, they 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

were all painted and powdered to the favor that Span- 
ish women everywhere come to. 

When the bad breakfast was over, and the waiters 
were laying the table for another as bad, our Basque 
porter came in and led us to the train for San Sebas- 
tian which he had promised us. It was now raining 
outside, and we were glad to climb into our apart- 
ment without at all seeing what Irun was or was not 
like. But we thought well of the place because we 
first experienced there the ample ease of a Spanish 
car. In Spain the railroad gauge is five feet six 
inches; and this car of ours was not only very spa- 
cious, but very clean, while the Trench cars that had 
brought us from Bordeaux to Bayonne and from Bay- 
onne to Irun were neither. I do not say all French 
cars are dirty, or all Spanish cars are as clean as they 
are spacious. The cars of both countries are hard to 
get into, by steep narrow footholds worse even than our 
flights of steps; in fact, the English cars are the only 
ones I know which are easy of access. But these have 
not the ample racks for hand-bags which the Spanish 
companies provide for travelers willing to take advan- 
tage of their trust by transferring much of their heavy 
stuff to them. Without owning that we were such 
travelers, I find this the place to say that, with the 
allowance of a hundred and thirty-two pounds free, 
our excess baggage in two large steamer-trunks did not 
cost us three dollars in a month's travel, with many 
detours, from Irun in the extreme north to Algeciras 
in the extreme south of Spain. 



n 

But in this sordid detail I am keeping the reader 

from the scenery. It had been growing more and 

10 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 

more striking ever since we began climbing into the 
Pyrenees from Bayonne; but upon the whole it was 
not so sublime as it was beautiful. There were some 
steep, sharp peaks, but mostly there were grassy val- 
leys with white cattle grazing in them, and many fields 
of Indian corn, endearingly homelike. This at least 
is mainly the trace that the scenery as far as Irun has 
left among my notes; and after Irun there is record 
of more and more corn. There was, in fact, more corn 
than anything else, though there were many orchards, 
also endearingly homelike, with apples yellow and 
red showing among the leaves still green on the trees; 
if there had been something more wasteful in the 
farming it would have been still more homelike, but 
a traveler cannot have everything. The hillsides were 
often terraced, as in Italy, and the culture apparent- 
ly close and conscientious. The farmhouses looked 
friendly and comfortable; at places the landscape was 
molested by some sort of manufactories which could 
not conceal their tall chimneys, though they kept the 
secret of their industry. They were never, really, very 
bad, and I would have been willing to let them pass 
for fulling-mills, such as I was so familiar with in 
Don Quixote, if I had thought of these in time. But 
one ought to be honest at any cost, and I must own 
that the Spain I was now for the first time seeing 
with every-day eyes was so little like the Spain of my 
boyish vision that I never once recurred to it. That 
was a Spain of cork-trees, of groves by the green mar- 
gins of mountain brooks, of habitable hills, where 
shepherds might feed their flocks and mad lovers and 
maids forlorn might wander and maunder; and here 
were fields of corn and apple orchards and vineyards 
reddening and yellowing up to the doors of those 
comfortable farmhouses, with nowhere the sign of 

2 11 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

a Christian cavalier or a turbaned Infidel. As a man 
I could not help liking what I saw, but I could also 
grieve for the boy who would have been so disap- 
pointed if he had come to the Basque provinces of 
Spain when he was from ten to fifteen years old, in- 
stead of seventy-four. 

It took our train nearly an hour to get by twenty 
miles of those pleasant farms and the pretty hamlets 
which they now and then clustered into. But that 
was fast for a Spanish way-train, which does not run, 
but, as it were, walks with dignity and makes long stops 
at stations, to rest and let the locomotive roll itself a 
cigarette. By the time we reached San Sebastian our 
rain had thickened to a heavy downpour, and by the 
time we mounted to our rooms, three pair up in the 
hotel, it was storming in a fine fury over the bay under 
them, and sweeping the curving quays and tossing the 
feathery foliage of the tamarisk-shaded promenade. 
The distinct advantage of our lofty perch was the 
splendid sight of the tempest, held from doing its worst 
by the mighty headlands standing out to sea on the 
right and left. But our rooms were cold with the 
stony cold of the south when it is cooling off from its 
summer, and we shivered in the splendid sight. 



in 



The inhabitants of San Sebastian will not hesitate 
to say that it is the prettiest town in Spain, and I 
do not know that they could be hopefully contradicted. 
It is very modern in its more obvious aspects, with a 
noble thoroughfare called the Avenida de Libertad for 
its principal street, shaded with a double row of those 
feathery tamarisks, and with handsome shops glitter- 

12 













V* "^ 



^ 



' 





p 




^'. 




-^ 









/■■•■ ■;^;^v/ 



THE CASINO, SAN SEBASTIAN, LOOKS OUT UPON THE CURVING CONCHA 
AND THE BLUE BAY 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 

ing on both sides of it. Very easily it is first of the 
fashionable watering-places of Spain; the King has 
his villa there, and the court comes every summer. 
But they had gone by the time we got there, and the 
town wore the dejected look of out-of -season summer 
resorts; though there was the apparatus of gaiety, the 
fine casino at one end of the beach, and the villas of 
the rich and noble all along it to the other end. On 
the sand were still many bathing-machines, but many 
others had begun to climb for greater safety during 
the winter to the street above. We saw one hardy 
bather dripping up from the surf and seeking shelter 
among those that remained, but they were mostly ten- 
anted by their owners, who looked shoreward through 
their open doors, and made no secret of their cozy 
domesticity, where they sat and sewed or knitted and 
gossiped with their neighbors. Good wives and moth- 
ers they doubtless were, but no doubt glad to be rest- 
ing from the summer pleasure of others. They had 
their beautiful names written up over their doors, and 
were for the service of the lady visitors only; there 
were other machines for gentlemen, and no doubt it 
was their owners whom we saw gathering the fat sea- 
weed thrown up by the storm into the carts drawn by 
oxen over the sand. The oxen wore no yokes, but 
pulled by a band drawn over their foreheads under 
their horns, and they had the air of not liking the 
arrangement; though, for the matter of that, I have 
never seen oxen that seemed to like being yoked. 

When we came down to dinner we found the tables 
fairly full of belated visitors, who presently proved 
tourists flying south like ourselves. The dinner was 
good, as it is in nearly all Spanish hotels, where for 
an average of three dollars a day you have an inclusive 

rate which you must double for as good accommoda- 

13 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

tion in our States. Let no one, I say, fear the rank 
cookery so much imagined of the Peninsula, the oil, 
the pepper, the kid and the like strange meats; as in 
all other countries of Europe, even England itself, 
there is a local version, a general convention of the 
French cuisine, quite as good in Spain as elsewhere, 
and oftener superabundant than subabundant. The 
plain water is generally good, with an American edge 
of freshness; but if you will not trust it (we had to 
learn to trust it) there are agreeable Spanish mineral 
waters, as well as the Apollinaris, the St. Galmier, and 
the Perrier of other civilizations, to be had for the 
asking, at rather greater cost than the good native 
wines, often included in the inclusive rate. 

Besides this convention of the Erench cuisine there 
is almost everywhere a convention of the English lan- 
guage in some one of the waiters. You must not stray 
far from the beaten path of your immediate wants, 
but in this you are safe. At San Sebastian we had 
even a wider range with the English of the little intel- 
lectual-looking, pale Spanish waiter, with a fine Na- 
poleonic head, who came to my help when I began 
to flounder in the language which I had read so much 
and spoken so little or none. He had been a year in 
London, he said, and he took us for English, though, 
now he came to notice it, he perceived we were Ameri- 
cans because we spoke " quicklier " than the English. 
We did not protest ; it was the mildest criticism of our 
national accent which we were destined to get from Eng- 
lish-speaking Spaniards before they found we were not 
the English we did not wish to be taken for. "After 
dinner we asked for a fire in one of our grates, but the 
maid declared there was no fuel ; and, though the host- 
ess denied this and promised us a fire the next night, 

she forgot it till nine o'clock, and then we would not 

14 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 

have it. The cold abode with us indoors to the last 
at San Sebastian, but the storm (which had hummed 
and whistled theatrically at our windows) broke dur- 
ing the first night, and the day followed with several 
intervals of sunshine, which bathed us in a glowing 
expectation of overtaking the fugitive summer farther 
south. 



IV 



In the mean time we hired a beautiful Bnsque cab- 
man with a red Basque cap and high-hooked Basque 
nose to drive us about at something above the legal 
rate and let us not leave any worthy thing in San 
Sebastian unseen. He took us, naturally, to several 
churches, old and new, with their Gothic and rococo 
interiors, which I still find glooming and glinting 
among my evermore thickening impressions of like 
things. We got from them the sense of that archi- 
tectural and sculptural richness which the interior of 
no Spanish church ever failed measurably to give ; but 
what their historical associations were I will not offer 
to say. The associations of San Sebastian with the 
past are in all things vague, at least for me. She 
was indeed taken from the French by the English 
under Wellington during the Peninsular War, but of 
older, if not unhappier farther-off days and battles 
longer ago her history as I know it seems to know 
little. Tt knows of savage and merciless battles be- 
tween the partisans of Don Carlos and those of Queen 
Isabella so few decades since as not to be the stuff 
of mere pathos yet, and I am not able to blink the 
fact that my beloved Basques fought on the wrong 
side, when they need not have fought at all. Why 

they were Carlists tHev could perhaps no more say 

15 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

than I could. The monumental historic fact is that 
the Basques have been where they are immeasurably 
beyond the memories of other men; what the scope of 
their own memories is one could perhaps confidently say 
only in Basque if one could say anything. Of course, 
in the nature of things, the Phoenicians must have 
been there and the Greeks, doubtless, if they ever got 
outside of the Pillars of Hercules; the Romans, of 
course, must have settled and civilized and then Chris- 
tianized the province. It is next neighbor to that 
province of Asturias in which alone the Arabs failed 
to conquer the Goths, and from which Spain was to 
live and grow again and recover all her losses from 
the Moors; but what the share of San Sebastian was 
in this heroic fate, again I must leave the Basques to 
say. They would doubtless say it with sufficient self- 
Tespect, for wherever we came in contact that day 
with the Basque nature we could not help imagining 
in it a sense of racial merit equaling that of the Welsh 
themselves, who are indeed another branch of the same 
immemorial Iberian stock, if the Basques are Iberians. 
Like the Welsh, they have the devout tradition that 
they never were conquered, but yielded to circum- 
stances when these became too strong for them. 

Among the ancient Spanish liberties which were 
restricted by the consolidating monarchy from age to 
age, the Basque fueros, or rights, were the oldest ; they 
lasted quite to our own day ; and although it is known 
to more ignorant men that these privileges (including 
immunity from conscription) have now been abrogated, 
the custodian of the House of Provincial Deputies, 
whom our driver took us to visit, was such a glowing 
Basque patriot that he treated them as in full force. 
His pride in the seat of the local government spared 

us no detail of the whole electric-lighting svstem, or 

16 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 

even the hose-bibs for guarding the edifice against fire, 
let alone every picture and photograph on the wall of 
every chamber of greater or less dignity, with every 
notable table and chair. He certainly earned the 
peseta I gave him, but he would have done far more 
for it if we had suffered him to take us up another 
flight of stairs; and he followed us in our descent 
with bows and adieux that ought to have left no doubt 
in our minds of the persistence of the Basque fueros. 



It was to such a powerful embodiment of the local 
patriotism that our driver had brought us from another 
civic palace overlooking the Plaza de la Constitucion, 
chiefly notable now for having been the old theater of 
the bull-fights. The windows in the houses round still 
bear the numbers by Avhich they were sold to spectators 
as boxes; but now the municipality has built a beauti- 
ful brand-new bull-ring in San Sebastian; and I do 
not know just why we were required to inspect the 
interior of the edifice overlooking this square. I only 
know that at sight of our bewilderment a workman 
doing something to the staircase clapped his hands 
orientally, and the custodian was quickly upon us 
in response to a form of summons which we were to 
find so often used in Spain. He was not so crushing- 
ly upon us as that other custodian ; he was apologetical- 
ly proud, rather than boastfully; at times he waved 
his hands in deprecation, and would have made us 
observe that the place was little, very little; he de- 
plored it like a host who wishes his possessions praised. 
Among the artistic treasures of the place from which 
he did not excuse us there were some pen-drawings, 

17 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

such as writing-masters execute without lifting the pen 
from the paper, by a native of South America, prob- 
ably of Basque descent, since the Basques have done 
so much to people that continent. We not only ad- 
mired these, but we would not consent to any of the 
custodian's deprecations, especially when it came to 
question of the pretty salon in which Queen Victoria 
was received on her first visit to San Sebastian. We 
supposed then, and in fact I had supposed till this 
moment, that it was Queen Victoria of Great Britain 
who was meant; but now I realize that it must have 
been the queen consort of Spain, who seems already to 
have made herself so liked there. 

She, of course, comes every summer to San Sebas- 
tian, and presently our driver took us to see the 
royal villa by the shore, withdrawn, perhaps from a 
sense of its extreme plainness, not to say ugliness, 
among its trees and vines behind its gates and walls. 
Our driver excused himself for not being able to show 
us through it ; he gladly made us free of an unrestricted 
view of the royal bathing-pavilion, much more frank- 
ly splendid in its gilding, beside the beach. Other 
villas ranked themselves along the hillside, testifying 
to the gaiety of the social life in summers past and 
summers to come. In the summer just past the gaiety 
may have been interrupted by the strikes taking in 
the newspapers the revolutionary complexion which it 
was now said they did not wear. At least, when the 
King had lately come to fetch the royal household 
away nothing whatever happened, and the " constitu- 
tional guarantees," suspended amidst the ministerial 
anxieties, were restored during the month, with the 
ironical applause of the liberal press, which pretended 
that there had never been any need of their suspension. 

18 




THE SEA SWEEPS INLAND IN A CIRCLE OF BLUE, TO FORM THE ENTRANCE 
TO THE HARBOR, SAN SEBASTIAN 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 



VI 



All pleasures, mixed or unmixed, must end, and 
the qualified joy of our drive through San Sebastian 
came to a close on our return to our hotel well within 
the second hour, almost within its first half. When 
I proposed paying our driver for the exact time, he 
drooped upon his box and, remembering my remorse 
in former years for standing upon my just rights in 
such matters, I increased the fare, peseta by peseta, 
till his sinking spirits rose, and he smiled gratefully 
upon me and touched his brave red cap as he drove 
away. He had earned his money, if racking his in- 
vention for objects of interest in San Sebastian was 
a merit. At the end we were satisfied that it was a 
well-built town with regular blocks in the modern 
quarter, and not without the charm of picturesqueness 
which comes of narrow and crooked lanes in the older 
parts. Prescient of the incalculable riches before us, 
we did not ask much of it, and we got all we asked. I 
should be grateful to San Sebastian, if for nothing 
else than the two very Spanish experiences I had there. 
One concerned a letter for me which had been refused 
by the bankers named in my letter of credit, from a 
want of faith, I suppose, in my coming. When I did 
come I was told that I would find it at the post-office. 
That would be well enough when I found the post- 
office, which ought to have been easy enough, but which 
presented certain difficulties in the driving rain of our 
first afternoon. At last in a fine square I asked a 
fellow-man in my best conversational Spanish where 
the post-office was, and after a moment's apparent 
suffering he returned, " Do you speak English V 
"Yes," I said, "and I am so glad you do." "Not 

19 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

at all. I don't speak anything else. Great pleasure. 
There is the post-office/' and it seemed that I had 
hardly escaped collision with it. But this was the 
beginning, not the end, of my troubles. When I 
showed my card to the poste restante clerk, he went 
carefully through the letters bearing the initial of my 
name and denied that there was any for me. We 
entered into reciprocally bewildering explanations, and 
parted altogether baffled. Then, at the hotel, I con- 
sulted with a capable young office-lady, who tardily 
developed a knowledge of English, and we agreed that 
it would be well to send the cliico to the post-office for 
it. The chico, corresponding in a Spanish hotel to a 
piccolo in Germany or a page in England, or our own 
now evanescing bell-boy, was to get a peseta for bring- 
ing me the letter. He got the peseta, though he only 
brought me word that the authorities would send the 
letter to the hotel by the postman that night. The 
authorities did not send it that night, and the next 
morning I recurred to my bankers. There, on my 
entreaty for some one who could meet my Spanish 
at least half-way in English, a manager of the bank 
came out of his office and reassured me concerning the 
letter which I had now begun to imagine the most 
important I had ever missed. Even while we talked 
the postman came in and owned having taken the letter 
back to the office. He voluntarily promised to bring 
it to the bank at one o'clock, when I hastened to meet 
him. At that hour every one was out at lunch ; I came 
again at four, when everybody had returned, but the 
letter was not delivered; at five, just before the bank 
closed, the letter, which had now grown from a carta 
to a cartela, was still on its way. I left San Sebastian 
without it; and will it be credited that when it was 

forwarded to me a week later at Madrid it proved the 

20 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 

most fatuous missive imaginable, wholly concerning 
the writer's own affairs and none of mine ? 

I cannot guess yet why it was withheld from me, 
but since the incident brought me that experience of 
Spanish politeness, I cannot grieve for it. The young 
banker who left his region of high finance to come 
out and condole with me, in apologizing for the orig- 
inal refusal of my letter, would not be contented with 
so little. Nothing would satisfy him but going with 
me, on my hinted purpose, and inquiring with me 
at the railroad office into the whole business of circular 
tickets, and even those kilometric tickets which the 
Spanish railroads issue to such passengers as will have 
their photographs affixed to them for the prevention of 
transference. As it seemed advisable not to go to this 
extreme till I got to Madrid, my kind young banker 
put himself at my disposal for any other service I 
could imagine from him ; but I searched myself in 
vain for any desire, much less necessity, and I parted 
from him at the door of his bank with the best pos- 
sible opinion of the Basques. I suppose he was a 
Basque; at any rate, he was blond, which the Span- 
iards are mostly not, and the Basques often are. "Now 
I am sorry, since he was so kind, that I did not get 
him to read me the Basque inscription on the front of 
his bank, which looked exactly like that on the bank 
at Bayonne; I should not have understood it, but I 
should have known what it sounded like, if it sounded 
like anything but Basque. 

Everybody in San Sebastian seemed resolved to 
outdo every other in kindness. In a shop where 
we endeavored to explain that we wanted to get 
a fiat cap which should be both Basque and red, a 
lady who was buying herself a hat asked in English 
if she could help us. When we gladly answered that 

21 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

she could, she was silent, almost to tears, and it ap- 
peared that in this generous offer of aid she had ex- 
hausted her whole stock of English. Her mortifica- 
tion, her painful surprise, at the strange catastrophe, 
was really pitiable, and we hastened to escape from 
it to a shop across the street. There instantly a small 
boy rushed enterprisingly out and brought back with 
him a very pretty girl who spoke most of the little 
French which has made its way in San Sebastian 
against the combined Basque and Spanish, and a cap 
of the right flatness and redness was brought. I must 
not forget, among the pleasures done us by the place, 
the pastry cook's shop which advertised in English 
" Tea at all Hours," and which at that hour of our 
afternoon we now found so opportune, that it seemed 
almost personally attentive to us as the only Anglo- 
Saxon visitors in town. The tea might have been bet- 
ter, but it was as good as it knew how; and the small 
boy who came in with his mother (the Spanish mother 
seldom fails of the company of a small boy) in her 
moments of distraction succeeded in touching with his 
finger all the pieces of pastry except those we were 
eating. 



VII 



The high aquiline nose which is characteristic of 
the autochthonic race abounds in San Sebastian, but 
we saw no signs of the high temper which is said to 
go with it. This, indeed, was known to me chiefly from 
my first reading in Don Quixote of the terrific combat 
between the squire of the Biscayan ladies whose car- 
riage the knight of La Mancha stopped after his en- 
gagement with the windmills. In their exchange of 
insults incident to the knight's desire that the ladies 

22 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 

should go to Toboso and thank Dulcinea for his de- 
livery of them from the necromancers he had put to 
flight in the persons of two Benedictine monks, " ' Get 
gone/ the squire called, in bad Spanish and worse 
Biscayan, ' Get gone, thou knight, and Devil go with 
thou ; or by He Who me create ... me kill thee now 
so sure as me be Biscayan/ " and when the knight 
called him an " inconsiderable mortal/' and said that 
if he were a gentleman he would chastise him : " ' What ! 
me no gentleman V replied the Biscayan. ' I swear 
thou be liar as me be Christian. . . . Me will show 
thee me be Biscayan, and gentleman by land, gentle- 
man by sea, gentleman in spite of Devil ; and thou lie if 
thou say the contrary.' " 

It is a scene which will have lived in the memory of 
every reader, and I recurred to it hopefully but vainly 
in San Sebastian, where this fiery threefold gentleman 
might have lived in his time. It would be interesting 
to know how far the Basques speak broken Spanish in 
a fashion of their own, which Cervantes tried to 
represent in the talk of his Biscayan. Like the 
Welsh again they strenuously keep their immemorial 
language against the inroads of the neighboring speech. 
How much they fix it in a modern literature it would 
be easier to ask than to say. I suppose there must be 
Basque newspapers; perhaps there are Basque novel- 
ists, there are notoriously Basque bards who recite 
their verses to the peasants, and doubtless there are 
poets who print their rhymes: and I blame myself 
for not inquiring further concerning them of that 
kindly Basque banker who wished so much to do some- 
thing for me in compensation for the loss of my worth- 
less letter. I knew, too cheaply, that the Basques have 
their poetical contests, as the Welsh have their musical 
competitions in the Eisteddfod, and thev are once more 

23 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TKAVELS 

like the Welsh, their brothers in antiquity, in calling 
themselves by a national name of their own. They call 
themselves Euskaldunac, which is as different from the 
name of Basque given them by the alien races as 
Cymru is from Welsh. 

All this lore I have easily accumulated from the 
guide-books since leaving San Sebastian, but I was 
carelessly ignorant of it in driving from the hotel 
to the station when we came away, and was much con- 
cerned in the overtures made us in a mixed Spanish, 
English, and French by a charming family from Chili, 
through the brother to one of the ladies and husband 
to the other. AVhen he perceived from my Spanish 
that we were not English, he rejoiced that we were 
Americans of the north, and as joyfully proclaimed 
that they were Americans of the south! We were 
at once sensible of a community of spirit in our dif- 
ference from our different ancestral races. They were 
Spanish, but with a New World blitheness which we 
nowhere afterward found in the native Spaniards ; and 
we were English, with a willingness to laugh and to 
joke which they had not perhaps noted in our an- 
cestral contemporaries. Again and again we met them 
in the different cities where we feared we had lost 
them, until we feared no more and counted confidently 
on seeing them wherever we went. They were always 
radiantly smiling; and upon this narrow ground I am 
going to base the conjecture that the most distinctive 
difference of the Western Hemisphere from the East- 
ern is its habit of seeing the fun of things. With 
those dear Chilians we saw the fun of many little 
hardships of travel which might have been insupport- 
able without the vision. Sometimes we surprised one 
another in the same hotel; sometimes it was in the 

street that we encountered, usually to exchange amus- 

24 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 

ing misfortunes. If we could have been constantly 
with these fellow-hemispherists our progress through 
Spain would have been an unbroken holiday. 

There is a superstition of travelers in Spain, much 
fostered by innkeepers and porters, that you cannot 
get seats in the fast trains without buying your tickets 
the day before, and then perhaps not, and we aban- 
doned ourselves to this fear at San Sebastian so far 
as to get places some hours in advance. But once 
established in the ten-foot-wide interior of the first- 
class compartment which we had to ourselves, every 
anxiety fell from us; and I do not know a more flat- 
tering emotion than that which you experience in sink- 
ing into your luxurious seat, and, after a glance at your 
hand-bags in the racks where they have been put with 
no strain on your own muscles, giving your eyes alto- 
gether to the joy of the novel landscape. 

The train was what they call a Rapido in Spain; 

and though we were supposed to be devouring space 

with indiscriminate gluttony, I do not think that in 

our mad rush of twenty-five miles an hour we failed 

to taste any essential detail of the scenery. But I wish 

now that I had known the Basques were all nobles, 

and that the peasants owned many of the little farms 

we saw declaring the general thrift. In the first two 

hours of the six to Burgos we ran through lovely 

valleys held in the embrace of gentle hills, where the 

fields of Indian corn were varied by groves of chestnut 

trees, where we could see the burrs gaping on their 

stems. The blades and tassels of the corn had been 

stripped away, leaving the ripe ears a-tilt at the top 

of the stalks, which looked like cranes standing on one 

leg with their heads slanted in pensive contemplation. 

There were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near 

the farmhouses, and all about there were other trees 

25 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

pollarded to the quick and tufted with mistletoe, not 
only the stout oaks, but the slim poplars trimmed up 
into tall plumes like the poplars in southern France. 
The houses, when they did not stand apart like our 
own farmhouses, gathered into gray-brown villages 
around some high-shouldered church with a bell-tower 
in front or at one corner of the fagade. In most of 
the larger houses an economy of the sun's heat, the 
only heat recognized in the winter of southern coun- 
tries, was practised by glassing in the balconies that 
stretched quite across their fronts and kept the cold 
from at least one story. It gave them a very cheery 
look, and must have made them livable at least in the 
daytime. Now and then the tall chimney of one of 
those manufactories we had seen on the way from Irim 
invited belief in the march of industrial prosperity; 
but whether the Basque who took work in a mill or a 
foundry forfeited his nobility remained a part of the 
universal Basque secret. From time to time a moun- 
tain stream brawled from under a world-old bridge, 
and then spread a quiet tide for the women to kneel 
beside and wash the clothes which they spread to dry 
on every bush and grassy slope of the banks. 

The whole scene changed after we ran out of the 
Basque country and into the austere landscape of 
old Castile. The hills retreated and swelled into 
mountains that were not less than terrible in their 
savage nakedness. The fields of corn and the orchards 
ceased, and the green of the pastures changed to the 
tawny gray of the measureless wheat-lands into which 
the valleys flattened and widened. There were no 
longer any factory chimneys; the villages seemed to 
turn from stone to mud; the human poverty showed 
itself in the few patched and tattered figures that fol- 
lowed the oxen in the interminable furrows shallowly 

26 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 

scraping the surface of the lonely levels. The haggard 
mountain ranges were of stone that seemed blanched 
with geologic superannuation, and at one place we ran 
by a wall of hoary rock that drew its line a mile long 
against the sky, and then broke and fell, and then 
staggered up again in a succession of titanic bulks. 
But stupendous as these mountain masses were, they 
were not so wonderful as those wheat-lands which in 
harvest-time must wash their shores like a sea of gold. 
Where these now rose and sank with the long ground- 
swell of the plains in our own West, a thin gray stubble 
covered them from the feeble culture which leaves 
Spain, for all their extent in both the Castiles, in 
Estremadura, in Andalusia, still without bread enough 
to feed herself, and obliges her to import alien wheat. 
At the lunch which we had so good in the dining- 
car we kept our talk to the wonder of the scenery, and 
well away from the interesting Spanish pair at our 
table. It is never safe in Latin Europe to count upon 
ignorance of English in educated people, or peo- 
ple who look so; and with these we had the reward 
of our prudence when the husband asked after dessert 
if we minded his smoking. His English seemed meant 
to open the way for talk, and we were willing he should 
do the talking. He spoke without a trace of accent, 
and we at once imagined circles in which it was now 
as chic for Spaniards to speak English as it once was 
to speak French. They are said never to speak French 
quite well; but nobody could have spoken English 
better than this gentleman, not even we who were, as 
he said he supposed, English. Truth and patriotism 
both obliged us to deny his conjecture; and when he 
intimated that he would not have known us for Ameri- 
cans because we did not speak witli the dreadful 
American accent, I hazarded my belief that this dread- 
3 27 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

fulness was personal rather than national. But he 
would not have it. Boston people, yes; they spoke 
very well, and he allowed other exceptions to the gen- 
eral rule of our nasal twang, which his wife summoned 
English enough to say was very ugly. They had suf- 
fered from it too universally in the Americans they 
had met during the summer in Germany to believe 
it was merely personal ; and I suppose one may own to 
strictly American readers that our speech is dreadful, 
that it is very ugly. These amiable Spaniards had no 
reason and no wish to wound; and they could never 
know what sweet and noble natures had been produc- 
ing their voices through their noses there in Germany. 
I for my part could not insist ; who, indeed, can defend 
the American accent, which is not so much an accent 
as a whiffle, a snuffle, a twang ? It was mortifying, all 
the same, to have it openly abhorred by a foreigner, 
and I willingly got away from the question to that 
of the weather. We agreed admirably about the heat 
in England where this gentleman went every summer, 
and had never found it so hot before. It was hot even 
in Denmark; but he warned me not to expect any 
warmth in Spain now that the autumn rains had 
begun. 

If this couple represented a cosmopolitan and mod- 
ern Spain, it was interesting to escape to something 
entirely native in the three young girls who got in at 
the next station and shared our compartment with us 
as far as we went. They were tenderly kissed by their 
father in putting them on board, and held in lingering 
farewells at the window till the train started. The 
eldest of the three then helped in arranging their 
baskets in the rack, but the middle sister took motherly 
charge of the youngest, whom she at once explained to 
us as enferma. She was the prettiest girl of the con- 

28 



SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY 

ventional Spanish type we Lad yet seen: dark-eyed 
and dark-haired, regular, but a little overfull of the 
chin which she would presently have double. She was 
very, very pale of face, with a pallor in which she had 
assisted nature with powder, as all Spanish women, 
old and young, seem to do. But there was no red 
underglow in the pallor, such as gives many lovely faces 
among them the complexion of whitewash over pink 
on a stucco surface. She wrapped up the youngest 
sister, who would by and by be beautiful, and now 
being sick had only the flush of fever in her cheeks, and 
propped her in the coziest corner of the car, where she 
tried to make her keep still, but could not make her 
keep silent. In fact, they all babbled together, over 
the basket of luncheon which the middle sister opened 
after springing up the little table-leaf of the window, 
and spread with a substantial variety including fowl 
and sausage and fruit, such as might tempt any sick 
appetite, or a well one, even. As she brought out each 
of these victuals, together with a bottle of wine and 
a large bottle of milk, she first offered it to us, and 
when it was duly refused with thanks, she made the 
invalid eat and drink, especially the milk which she 
made a wry face at. When she had finished they all 
began to question whether her fever was rising for the 
day; the good sister felt the girl's pulse, and got out 
a thermometer, which together they arranged under 
her arm, and then duly inspected. It seemed that the 
fever was rising, as it might very well be, but the mid- 
dle sister was not moved from her notable calm, and 
the eldest did not fear. At a place where a class of 
young men was to be seen before an ecclesiastical col- 
lege the girls looked out together, and joyfully decided 
that the brother (or possibly a cousin) whom they 

expected to see, was really there among them. When 

29 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

we reached Burgos we felt that we had assisted at a 
drama of family medicine and affection which was so 
sweet that if the fever was not very wisely it was very 
winningly treated. It was not perhaps a very serious 
case, and it meant a good deal of pleasant excitement 
for all concerned. 



Ill 

BURGOS AM) THE BITTER COLD OF 
BURGOS 

It appears to be the use in most minor cities of 
Spain for the best hotel to send the worst omnibus 
to the station, as who should say, " Good wine needs 
no bush." At Burgos we were almost alarmed by the 
shabbiness of the omnibus for the hotel we had chosen 
through a consensus of praise in the guide-books, and 
thought we must have got the wrong one. It was 
indeed the wrong one, but because there is no right 
hotel in Burgos when you arrive there on an after- 
noon of early October, and feel the prophetic chill of 
that nine months of winter which is said to contrast 
there with three months of hell. 



The air of Burgos when it is not the breath of a 
furnace is so heavy and clammy through the testimony 
of all comers that Burgos herself no longer attempts 
to deny it from her high perch on the uplands of Old 
Castile. Just when she ceased to deny it, I do not 
know, but probably when she ceased to be the sole 
capital and metropolis of Christian Spain and shared 
her primacy with Toledo sometime in the fourteenth 
century. Now, in the twentieth, we asked nothing of 

31 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

her but two rooms in which we could have fire, but 
the best hotel in Burgos openly declared that it had 
not a fireplace in its whole extent, though there must 
have been one in the kitchen. The landlord pointed 
out that it was completely equipped with steam-heating 
apparatus, but when I made him observe that there 
was no steam in the shining radiators, he owned with 
a shrug that there was truth in what I said. He 
showed us large, pleasant rooms to the south which 
would have been warm from the sun if the sun which 
we left playing in San Sebastian had been working 
that day at Burgos; he showed us his beautiful new 
dining-room, cold, with the same sunny exposure. I 
rashly declared that all would not do, and that I would 
look elsewhere for rooms with fireplaces. I had first 
to find a cab in order to find the other hotels, but I 
found instead that in a city of thirty-eight thousand 
inhabitants there was not one cab standing for hire 
in the streets. I tried to enlist the sympathies of some 
private carriages, but they remained indifferent, and 
I went back foiled, but not crushed, to our hotel. 
There it seemed that the only vehicle to be had was 
the omnibus which had brought us from the station. 
The landlord calmly (I did not then perceive the irony 
of his calm) had the horses put to and our baggage 
put on, and we drove away. But first we met our dear 
Chilians coming to our hotel from the hotel they had 
chosen, and from a search for hearthstones in others; 
and we drove to the only hotel they had left unvisited. 
There at our demand for fires the landlord all but 
laughed us to scorn; he laid his hand on the cold 
radiator in the hotel as if to ask what better we could 
wish than that. We drove back, humbled, to our own 
hotel, where the landlord met us with the Castilian 
calm he had kept at our departure. Then there was 

32 




CROUPS OF WOMEN ON THEIR KNEES BEATING CLOTHES IN THE 
WATER 



BUKGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS 

nothing for me but to declare myself the Prodigal 
Son returned to take the rooms he had offered us. We 
were so perfectly in his power that he could magnani- 
mously afford to offer us other rooms equally cold, but 
we did not care to move. The Chilians had retired 
baffled to their own hotel, and there was nothing for us 
but to accept the long evening of gelid torpor which 
we foresaw must follow the effort of the soup and 
wine to warm us at dinner. That night we heard 
through our closed doors agonized voices which we 
knew to be the voices of despairing American women 
wailing through the freezing corridors, " Can't she 
understand that I want boiling water ?" and, " Can't 
we go down-stairs to a fire somewhere?" We knew 
the one meant the chambermaid and the other the 
kitchen, but apparently neither prayer was answered. 



As soon as we had accepted our fate, while as yet 
the sun had not set behind the clouds which had kept 
it out of our rooms all day, we hurried out not only 
to escape the rigors of our hotel, but to see as soon as 
we could, as much as we could of the famous city. We 
had got an excellent cup of tea in the glass-roofed 
pavilion of our beautiful cold dining-room, and now 
our spirits rose level with the opportunities of the en- 
trancing walk we took along the course of the Arlanzon. 
I say course, because that is the right word to use of 
a river, but really there was no course in the Arlanzon. 
Between the fine, wide embankments and under the 
noble bridges there were smooth expanses of water 
(naturally with women washing at them), which re- 
flected like an afterglow of the evening sky the splendid 

masses of yarn hung red from the dyer's vats on the 

33 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

bank. The expanses of water were bordered by wider 
spaces of grass which had grown during the rainless 
summer, but which were no doubt soon to be submerged 
under the autumnal torrent the river would become. 
The street which shaped itself to the stream was a 
rather modern avenue, leading to a beautiful public 
garden, with the statues and fountains proper to a 
public garden, and densely shaded against the three 
infernal months of the Burgos year. But the houses 
were glazed all along their fronts with the sun-traps 
which we had noted in the Basque country, and which 
do not wait for a certain date in the almanac to do the 
work of steam-heating. They gave a tempting effect 
to the house-fronts, but they could not distract our 
admiration from the successive crowds of small boys 
playing at bull-fighting in the streets below, and in the 
walks of the public garden. The population of Burgos 
is above thirty-seven thousand and of the inhabitants 
at least thirty-six thousand are small boys, as I was 
convinced by the computation of the husband and 
brother of the Chilian ladies which agreed perfectly 
with my own hasty conjecture ; the rest are small girls. 
In fact large families, and large families chiefly of 
boys, are the rule in Spain everywhere ; and they every- 
where know how to play bull-fighting, to flap any-col- 
ored old shawl, or breadth of cloth in the face of the 
bull, to avoid his furious charges, and doubtless to deal 
him his death-wound, though to this climax I could not 
bear to follow. 

One or two of the bull-fighters offered to leave the 
national sport and show us the House of Miranda, but 
it was the cathedral which was dominating our desire, 
as it everywhere dominates the vision, in Burgos and 
out of Burgos as far as the city can be seen. The iron- 
gray bulk, all flattered or fretted bv Gothic art, rears 

34 



BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS 

itself from the clustering brown walls and roofs of the 
city, which it seems to gather into its mass below while 
it towers so far above them. We needed no pointing 
of the way to it; rather we should have needed in- 
struction for shunning it ; but we chose the way which 
led through the gate of Santa Maria where in an arch 
once part of the city wall, the great Cid, hero above 
every other hero of Burgos, sits with half a dozen more 
or less fabled or storied worthies of the renowned city. 
Then with a minute's walk up a stony sloping little 
street we were in the beautiful and reverend presence 
of one of the most august temples of the Christian 
faith. The avenue where the old Castilian nobles once 
dwelt in their now empty palaces climbs along the hill- 
side above the cathedral, which on its lower side seems 
to elbow off the homes of meaner men, and in front to 
push them away beyond a plaza not large enough for 
it. Even this the cathedral had not cleared of the horde 
of small boys who followed us unbidden to its doors 
and almost expropriated those authorized blind beggars 
who own the church doors in Spain. When we de- 
clined the further company of these boys they left us 
with expressions which I am afraid accused our judg- 
ment and our personal appearance; but in another mo- 
ment we were safe from their censure, and hidden as 
it were in the thick smell of immemorial incense. 

It was not the moment for doing the cathedral in 
the wonted tiresome and vulgar way ; that was reserved 
for the next day; now we simply wandered in the vast 
twilight spaces; and craned our necks to breaking in 
trying to pierce the gathered gloom in the vaulting over- 
head. It was a precious moment, but perhaps too weird, 
and we were glad to find a sacristan with business- 
like activity setting red candlesticks about a bier in the 
area before the choir, which here, as in the other Span- 

35 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

ish cathedrals, is planted frankly in the middle of the 
edifice, a church by itself, as if to emphasize the in- 
comparable grandeur of the cathedral. The sacristan 
willingly paused in his task and explained that he was 
preparing the bier for the funeral of a church dig- 
nitary (as we learned later, the dean) which was to 
take place the next day at noon ; and if we would come 
at that hour we should hear some beautiful music. 
We knew that he was establishing a claim on our future 
custom, but we thanked him and provisionally feed 
him, and left him at his work, at which we might have 
all but fancied him whistling, so cheerfully and briskly 
he went about it. 

Outside we lingered a moment to give ourselves the 
solemn joy of the Chapel of the Constable which forms 
the apse of the cathedral and is its chief glory. It 
mounted to the hard, gray sky, from which a keen 
wind was sweeping the narrow street leading to it, and 
blustering round the corner of the cathedral, so that 
the marble men holding up the Constable's coat-of-arms 
in the rear of his chapel might well have ached from 
the cold which searched the marrow of flesh-and-blood 
men below. These hurried by in flat caps and corduroy 
coats and trousers, with sashes at their waists and 
comforters round their necks; and they were pictu- 
resque quite in the measure of their misery. Some 
whose tatters were the most conspicuous feature of their 
costume, I am sure would have charmed me if I had 
been a painter; as a mere word-painter I find myself 
wishing I could give the color of their wretchedness 
to my page. 

in 

In the absence of any specific record in my note- 
book I do not know just how it was between this first 



BUEGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS 

glimpse of the cathedral and dinner, but it must have 
been on our return to our hotel, that the little inter- 
preter who had met us at the station, and had been 
intermittently constituting himself our protector ever 
since, convinced us that we ought to visit the City 
Hall, and see the outside of the marble tomb contain- 
ing the bones of the Cid and his wife. Such as the 
bones were we found they were not to be seen them- 
selves, and I do not know that I should have been the 
happier for their inspection. In fact, I have no great 
opinion of the Cid as an historical character or a poetic 
fiction. His epic, or his long ballad, formed no part 
of my young study in Spanish, and when four or five 
years ago a friend gave me a copy of it, beautifully 
printed in black letter, with the prayer that I should 
read it sometime within the twelvemonth, I found the 
time far too short. A3 a matter of fact I have never 
read the poem to this day, though I have often tried, 
and I doubt if its author ever intended it to be read. 
He intended it rather to be recited in stirring episodes, 
with spaces for refreshing slumber in the connecting 
narrative. As for the Cid in real life under his proper 
name of Rodrigo de Vivas, though he made his king 
publicly swear that he had had no part in the murder 
of his royal brother, and though he was the stoutest 
and bravest knight in Castile, I cannot find it alto- 
gether admirable in him that when his king banished 
him he should resolve to fight thereafter for any master 
who paid him best. That appears to me the part of a 
road-agent rather than a reformer, and it seems to me 
no amend for his service under Moorish princes that 
he should make war against them on his personal be- 
half or afterward under his own ungrateful king. He 
is friends now with the Arabian King of Saragossa, 

and now he defeats the Aragonese under the Castilian 

37 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

sovereign, and again he sends an insulting message by 
the Moslems to the Christian Count of Barcelona, whom 
he takes prisoner with his followers, but releases with- 
out ransom after a contemptuous audience. Is it well, 
I ask, that he helps one Moor against another, always 
for what there is in it, and when he takes Valencia 
from the infidels, keeps none of his promises to them, 
but having tortured the governor to make him give up 
his treasure, buries him to his waist and then burns 
him alive % After that, to be sure, he enjoys his declin- 
ing years by making forays in the neighboring country, 
and dies " satisfied with having done his duty toward 
his God." 

Our interpreter, who would not let us rest till he 
had shown us the box holding the Cid's bones, had 
himself had a varied career. If you believed him he 
was born in Madrid and had passed, when three years 
old, to New York, where he grew up to become a citizen 
and be the driver of a delivery wagon for a large depart- 
ment-store. He duly married an American woman who 
could speak not only French, German, and Italian, 
but also Chinese, and was now living with him in 
Burgos. His own English had somewhat fallen by 
the way, but what was left he used with great courage ; 
and he was one of those government interpreters whom 
you find at every large station throughout Spain in the 
number of the principal hotels of the place. They 
pay the government a certain tax for their license, 
though it was our friend's expressed belief that the 
government, on the contrary, paid him a salary of two 
dollars a day; but perhaps this was no better founded 
than his belief in a German princess who, when he 
went as her courier, paid him ten dollars a day and all 
his expenses. She wished him to come and live near 
her in Germany, so as to be ready to sno with her to 



BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS 

South America, but he had not yet made up his mind 
to leave Burgos, though his poor eyes watered with 
such a cold as only Burgos can give a man in the 
early autumn ; when I urged him to look to the bad 
cough he had, he pleaded that it was a very old cough. 
He had a fascination of his own, which probably came 
from his imaginative habit of mind, so that I could 
have wished more adoptive fellow-citizens were like 
him. He sympathized strongly with us in our grief 
with the cold of the hotel, and when we said that a 
small oil-heater would take the chill off a large room, 
he said that he had advised that very thing, but that 
our host had replied, with proud finality, " I am the 
landlord." Whether this really happened or not, I 
cannot say, but I have no doubt that our little guide 
had some faith in it as a real incident. He apparently 
had faith in the landlord's boast that he was going to 
have a stately marble staircase to the public entrance 
to his hotel, which was presently of common stone, 
rather tipsy in its treads, and much in need of scrub- 
bing. 

There is as little question in my mind that he be- 
lieved the carriage we had engaged to take us next 
morning to the Cartuja de Miraflores would be ready 
at a quarter before nine, and that he may have been 
disappointed when it was not ready until a quarter 
after. But it was worth waiting for if to have a team 
composed of a brown mule on the right hand and a gray 
horse on the left was to be desired. These animals 
which nature had so differenced were equalized by art 
through the lavish provision of sleigh-bells, without 
some strands of which no team in Spain is properly 
equipped. Besides, as to his size the mule was quite 
as large as the horse, and as to his tail he was much 
more decorative. About two inches after this member 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

left his body it was closely shaved for some six inches 
or more, and for that space it presented the effect of a 
rather large size of garden-hose; below, it swept his 
thighs in a lordly switch. If anything could have added 
distinction to our turnout it would have been the stiff 
side-whiskers of our driver: the only pair I saw in 
real life after seeing them so long in pictures on boxes 
of raisins and cigars. There they were associated with 
the look and dress of a torrero, and our coachman, 
though an old Castilian of the austerest and most 
taciturn pattern, may have been in his gay youth an 
Andalusian bull-fighter. 



IV 

Our pride in our equipage soon gave way to our 
interest in the market for sheep, cattle, horses, and 
donkeys which we passed through just outside the city. 
The market folk were feeling the morning's cold ; shep- 
herds folded in their heavy shawls leaned motionless 
on their long staves, as if hating to stir ; one ingenious 
boy wore a live lamb round his neck which he held 
close by the legs for the greater comfort of it; under 
the trees by the roadside some of the peasants were 
cooking their breakfasts and warming themselves at the 
fires. The sun was on duty in a cloudless sky; but 
all along the road to the Cartuja we drove between 
rows of trees so thickly planted against his summer 
rage that no ray of his friendly heat could now reach 
us. At times it seemed as if from this remorselessly 
shaded avenue we should escape into the open ; the trees 
gave way and we caught glimpses of wide plains and 
distant hills; then they closed upon us again, and in 
their chill shadow it was no comfort to know that in 

summer, when the townspeople got through their work, 

40 



BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS 

they came out to these groves, men, women, and chil- 
dren, and had supper under their hospitable boughs. 

One comes to almost any Cartuja at last, and we 
found ours on a sunny top just when the cold had 
pinched us almost beyond endurance, and joined a 
sparse group before the closed gate of the convent. 
The group was composed of poor people who had 
come for the dole of food daily distributed from the 
convent, and better-to-do country-folk who had brought 
things to sell to the monks, or were there on affairs 
not openly declared. But it seemed that it was a saint's 
day; the monks were having service in the church 
solely for their own edification, and they had shut us 
sinners out not only by locking the gate, but by taking 
away the wire for ringing the bell, and leaving nothing 
but a knocker of feeble note with which different mem- 
bers of our indignation meeting vainly hammered. Our 
guide assumed the virtue of the greatest indignation, 
though he ought to have known that we could not get 
in on that saint's day ; but it did not avail, and the little 
group dispersed, led off by the brown peasant who was 
willing to share my pleasure in our excursion as a good 
joke on us, and smiled with a show of teeth as white 
as the eggs in his basket. After all, it was not wholly 
a hardship ; we could walk about in the sunny if some- 
what muddy open, and warm ourselves against the icily 
shaded drive back to town; besides, there was a little 
girl crouching at the foot of a tree, and playing at a 
phase of the housekeeping which is the game of little 
girls the world over. Her sad, still-faced mother stand- 
ing near, with an interest in her apparently renewed 
by my own, said that she was four years old, and joined 
me in watching her as she built a pile of little sticks 
and boiled an imaginary little kettle over them. I was 

so glad even of a make-believe fire that I dropped a 

41 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

copper coin beside it, and the mother smiled pensively 
as if grateful but not very hopeful from this beneficence, 
though after reflection I had made my gift a u big dog " 
instead of a " small dog/' as the Spanish call a ten 
and a five centimo piece. The child bent her pretty 
head shyly on one side, and went on putting more sticks 
under her supposititious pot. 

I found the little spectacle reward enough in itself 
and in a sort compensation for our failure to see the 
exquisite alabaster tomb of Juan II. and his wife Isabel 
which makes the Cartuja Church so famous. There are 
a great many beautiful tombs in Burgos, but none so 
beautiful there (or in the whole world if the books say 
true) as this ; though we made what we could of some 
in the museum, where we saw for the first time in the 
recumbent effigies of a husband and wife, with features 
worn away by time and incapable of expressing the 
disappointment, the surprise they may have felt in the 
vain effort to warm their feet on the backs of the little 
marble angels put there to support them. We made 
what we could, too, of the noted Casa de Miranda, the 
most famous of the palaces in which the Castilian 
nobles have long ceased to live at Burgos. There we 
satisfied our longing to see a patio, that roofless colon- 
naded court which is the most distinctive feature of 
Spanish domestic architecture, and more and more dis- 
tinctively so the farther south you go, till at Seville 
you see it in constant prevalence. At Burgos it could 
never have been a great comfort, but in this House of 
Miranda it must have been a great glory. The spaces 
between many of the columns have long been bricked 
in, but there is fine carving on the front and the vault- 
ing of the staircase that climbs up from it in neglected 
grandeur. So many feet have trodden its steps that 

they are worn hollow in the middle, and to keep from 

42 



BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS 

falling you must go up next the wall. The object in 
going up at all is to join in the gallery an old melan- 
choly custodian in looking down into the patio, with his 
cat making her toilet beside him, and to give them a 
fee which they receive with, equal calm. Then, when 
you have Come down the age-worn steps without break- 
ing your neck, you have done the House of Miranda, 
and may lend yourself with what emotion you choose 
to the fact that this ancient seat of hidalgos has now 
fallen to the low industry of preparing pigskins to be 
wine-skins. 

I do not think that a company of hidalgos in com- 
plete medieval armor could have moved me more strong- 
ly than that first sight of these wine-skins, distended 
with wine, which we had caught in approaching the 
House of Miranda. We had to stop in the narrow 
street, and let them pass piled high on a vintner's 
wagon, and looking like a load of pork: they are 
trimmed and left to keep the shape of the living pig, 
which they emulate at its bulkiest, less the head and 
feet, and seem to roll in fatness. It was joy to realize 
what they were, to feel how Spanish, how literary, how 
picturesque, how romantic. There they were such as 
the wine-skins are that hang from the trees of pleasant 
groves in many a merry tale, and invite all swains and 
shepherds and wandering cavaliers to tap their bulk 
and drain its rich plethora. There they were such as 
Don Quixote, waking from his dream at the inn, saw 
them malignant giants and fell enchanters, and slashed 
them with his sword till he had spilled the room half 
full of their blood. For me this first sight of them 
was magic. It brought back my boyhood as nothing 
else had yet, and I never afterward saw them without 
a return to those days of my delight in all Spanish 
things. 

43 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 



Literature and its associations, no matter from how 
lowly suggestion, must always be first for me, and I 
still thought of those wine - skins in yielding to the 
claims of the cathedral on my wonder and reverence 
when now for the second time we came to it. The 
funeral ceremony of the dean was still in course, and 
after listening for a moment to the mighty orchestral 
music of it — the deep bass of the priests swelling up 
with the organ notes, and suddenly shot with the shrill, 
sharp trebles of the choir-boys and pierced with the 
keen strains of the violins — we left the cathedral to 
the solemn old ecclesiastics who sat confronting the 
bier, and once more deferred our more detailed and 
intimate wonder. We went, in this suspense of emo- 
tion, to the famous Convent of Las Huelgas, which in- 
vites noble ladies to its cloistered repose a little beyond 
the town. We entered to the convent church through a 
sort of slovenly court where a little girl begged severely, 
almost censoriously, of us, and presently a cold-faced 
young priest came and opened the church door. Then 
we found the interior of that rank Spanish baroque 
which escapes somehow r the effeminate effusiveness of 
the Italian; it does not affect you as decadent, but as 
something vigorously perfect in its sort, somberly au- 
thentic, and ripe from a root and not a graft. In its 
sort, the high altar, a gigantic triune, with massive 
twisted columns and swagger statues of saints and 
heroes in painted wood, is a prodigy of inventive piety, 
and compositely has a noble exaltation in its powerful 
lift to the roof. 

The nuns came beautifully dressed to hear mass at 

the grilles giving into the chapel adjoining the church ; 

44 



BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS 

the tourist may have his glimpse of them there on Sun- 
clays, and on week-days he may have his guess of their 
cloistered life and his wonder how much it continues 
the tradition of repose which the name of the old garden 
grounds implies. These lady nuns must be of patrician 
lineage and of fortune enough to defray their expense 
in the convent, which is of the courtliest origin, for 
it was founded eight hundred years ago by Alfonso 
VIII. " to expiate his sins and to gratify his queen," 
who probably knew of them. I wish now I had known, 
while I was there, that the abbess of Las Huelgas had 
once had the power of life and death in the neighbor- 
hood, and could hang people if she liked; I cannot 
think just what good it would have done me, but one 
likes to realize such things on the spot. She is still 
one of the greatest ladies of Spain, though perhaps not 
still " lady of ax and gibbet," and her nuns are of like 
dignity. In their chapel are the tombs of Alfonso and 
his queen, whose figures are among those on the high 
altar of the church. She was Eleanor Plantagenet, the 
daughter of our Henry II., and was very fond of Las 
Huelgas, as if it were truly a rest for her in the far- 
off land of Spain; I say our Henry II., for in the 
eleventh century we Americans were still English, un- 
der the heel of the Normans, as not the fiercest repub- 
lican of us now need shame to own. 

In a sense of this historical unity, at Las Huelgas 
we felt as much at home as if we had been English 
tourists, and we had our feudal pride in the palaces 
where the Oastilian nobles used to live in Burgos as 
we returned to the town. Their deserted seats are 
mostly to be seen after yon pass through the Moorish 
gate overarching the stony, dusty, weedy road hard by 
the place where the house of the Cid is said to have 

stood. The arch, so gracefully Saracenic, was the first 

45 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

monument of the Moslem obsession of the country 
which has left its signs so abundantly in the south; 
here in the far north the thing seemed almost pre- 
historic, almost preglacially old, the witness of a world 
utterly outdated. But perhaps it was not more utterly 
outdated than the residences of the nobles who had 
once made the ancient Castilian capital splendid, but 
were now as irrevocably merged in Madrid as the 
Arabs in Africa. 



VI 



Some of the palaces looked down from the narrow 
street along the hillside above the cathedral, but only 
one of them was kept up in the state of other days; 
and I could not be sure at what point this street had 
ceased to be the street where our guide said every one 
kept cows, and the ladies took big pitchers of milk 
away to sell every morning. But I am sure those ladies 
could have been of noble descent only in the farthest 
possible remove, and I do not suppose their cows were 
even remotely related to the haughty ox-team which 
blocked the way in front of the palaces and obliged us 
to dismount while our carriage was lifted round the 
cart. Our driver was coldly disgusted, but the driver 
of the ox-team preserved a calm as perfect as if he 
had been an hidalgo interested by the incident before 
his gate. It delayed us till the psychological moment 
when the funeral of the dean was over, and we could 
join the formidable party following the sacristan from 
chapel to chapel in the cathedral. 

We came to an agonized consciousness of the misery 

of this progress in the Chapel of the Constable, where 

it threatened to be finally stayed by the indecision of 

certain ladies of our nation in choosing among the postal 

46 



BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS 

cards for sale there. By this time we had suffered 
much from the wonders of the cathedral. The sacristan 
had not spared us a jewel or a silvered or gilded sacer- 
dotal garment or any precious vessel of ceremonial, so 
that our jaded wonder was inadequate to the demand 
of the beautiful tombs of the Constable and his lady 
upon it. The coffer of the Cid, fastened against the 
cathedral wall for a monument of his shrewdness in 
doing the Jews of Burgos, who, with the characteristic 
simplicity of their race, received it back full of sand 
and gravel in payment of the gold they had lent him 
in it, could as little move us. Perhaps if we could have 
believed that he finally. did return the value received, 
we might have marveled a little at it, but from what we 
knew of the Cid this Was not credible. We did what 
we could with the painted wood carving of the cloister 
doors; the life-size head of a man with its open mouth 
for a key-hole in another portal ; a fearful silver-plated 
chariot given by a rich blind woman for bearing the 
Host in the procession of Corpus Christi; but it was 
very little, and I am not going to share my failure with 
the reader by the vain rehearsal of its details. ~No 
literary art has ever reported a sense of picture or 
architecture or sculpture to me; the despised postal 
card is better for that; and probably throughout these 
" trivial fond records " I shall be found shirking as 
much as I may the details of such sights, seen or un- 
seen, as embitter the heart of travel with unavailing 
regret for the impossibility of remembering them. I 
must leave for some visit of the reader's own the large 
and little facts of the many chapels in the cathedral at 
Burgos, and I will try to overwhelm him with my sense 
of the whole mighty interior, the rich gloom, the Gothic 
exaltation, which I made such shift as I could to feel 
in the company of those picture-postal amateurs. It 

47 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

was like, say, a somber afternoon, verging to the twi- 
light of a cloudy sunset, so that when I came out of it 
into the open noon it was like emerging into a clear 
morrow. Perhaps because I could there shed the harass- 
ing human environment the outside of the cathedral 
seemed to me the best of it, and we lingered there for a 
moment in glad relief. 

VII 

One house in some forgotten square commemorates 

the state in which the Castilian nobles used to live in 

Burgos before Toledo, and then Valladolid, contested 

the primacy of the grim old capital of the northern 

uplands. We stayed for a moment to glance from our 

carriage through the open portal into its leafy patio 

shivering in the cold, and then we bade our guide 

hurry back with us to the hot luncheon which would 

be the only heat in our hotel. But to reach this we 

had to pass through another square, which we found 

full of peasants' ox-carts and mnle-teams; and there 

our guide instantly jumped down and entered into a 

livelier quarrel with those peaceable men and women 

than I could afterward have believed possible in Spain. 

I bade him get back to his seat beside the driver, who 

was abetting him with an occasional guttural and whom 

I bade turn round and go another way. I said that I 

had hired this turnout, and I was master, and I would 

be obeyed; but it seemed that I was wrong. My proud 

hirelings never left off their dispute till somehow the 

ox-carts and mule-teams were jammed together, and a 

thoroughfare found for us. Then it was explained 

that those peasants were always blocking that square 

in that way and that I had, however unwillingly, been 

discharging the duty of a public-spirited citizen in coni- 

48 




A BURGOS STREET 



BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS 

pelling them to give way. I did not care for that; I 
prized far more the quiet with which they had taken 
the whole affair. It was the first exhibition of the 
national repose of manner which we were to see so 
often again, south as well as north, and which I find 
it so beautiful to have seen. In a Europe abounding 
in volcanic Italians, nervous Germans, and exasperated 
Frenchmen, it was comforting, it was edifying to see 
those Castilian peasants so self-respectfully self-pos- 
sessed in the wrong. 

From time to time in the opener spaces we had got 
into the sun from the chill shadow of the narrow streets, 
but now it began to be cloudy, and when we re-entered 
our hotel it was almost as warm indoors as out. We 
thought our landlord might have so far repented as to 
put on the steam; but he had sternly adhered to his 
principle that the radiators were enough of themselves ; 
and after luncheon we had nothing for it but to go away 
from Burgos, and take with us such scraps of im- 
pression as we could. We decided that there was no 
street of gayer shops than those gloomy ones we had 
chanced into here and there; I do not remember now 
anything like a bookseller's or a milliner's or a draper's 
window. There was no sign of fashion among the 
ladies of Burgos, so far as we could distinguish them ; 
there was not a glowering or perking hat, and I do not 
believe there was a hobble-skirt in all the austere old 
capital except such as some tourist wore ; the black lace 
mantillas and the flowing garments of other periods 
flitted by through the chill alleys and into the dim door- 
ways. The only cheerfulness in the local color was to 
be noted in the caparison of the donkeys, which we were 
to find more and more brilliant southward. Do I say 
the only cheerfulness? I ought to except also the in- 
voluntary hilarity of a certain poor man's suit which 

49 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

was so patched together of myriad scraps that it looked 
as if cut from the fabric of a crazy-quilt. I owe him 
this notice the rather because he almost alone did not 
beg of us in a city which swarmed with beggars in a 
forecast of that pest of beggary which infests Spain 
everywhere. I do not say that the thing is without 
picturesqueness, without real pathos ; the little girl who 
kissed the copper I gave her in the cathedral remains 
endeared to me by that perhaps conventional touch of 
poetry. 

There was compensation for the want of presence 
among the ladies of Burgos, in the leading lady of the 
theatrical company who dined, the night before, at our 
hotel with the chief actors of her support, before giving 
a last performance in our ancient city. It happened 
another time in our Spanish progress that we had the 
society of strolling players at our hotel, and it was both 
times told us that the given company was the best 
dramatic company in Spain; but at Burgos we did 
not yet know that we were so singularly honored. The 
leading lady there had luminous black eyes, large like 
the head-lamps of a motor-car, and a wide crimson 
mouth which she employed as at a stage banquet 
throughout the dinner, while she talked and laughed 
with her fellow-actors, beautiful as bull-ilghters, clean- 
shaven, serious of face and shapely of limb. They were 
unaffectedly professional, and the lady made no pre- 
tense of not being a leading lady. One could see that 
she was the kindest creature in the world, and that she 
took a genuine pleasure in her huge, practicable eyes. 
At the other end of the room a Spanish family — 
father, mother, and small children, down to some in 
arms — were dining and the children wailing as Span- 
ish children will, regardless of time and place; and 
when the nurse brought one of the disconsolate infants 

50 



BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS 

to bo kissed by the leading lady one's heart went ont 
to her for the amiability and abundance of her caresses. 
The mere sight of their warmth did something to sup- 
ply the defect of steam in the steam-heating apparatus, 
but when one got beyond their radius there was nothing 
for the shivering traveler except to wrap himself in 
the down quilt of his bed and spread his steamer-rug 
over his knees till it was time to creep under both of 
them between the glacial sheets. 

We were sorry we had not got tickets for the lead- 
ing lady's public performance; it could have been so 
little more public; but we had not, and there was 
nothing else in Burgos to invite the foot outdoors after 
dinner. From my own knowledge I cannot yet say 
the place was not lighted; but my sense of the tangle 
of streets lying night long in a rich Gothic gloom shall 
remain unimpaired by statistics. Very possibly Burgos 
is brilliantly lighted with electricity; only they have 
not got the electricity on, as in our steam-heated hotel 
they had not got the steam on. 



VIII 



We had authorized our little interpreter to engage 
tickets for us by the mail-train the next afternoon for 
Valladolid; he pretended, of course, that the places 
could be had only by his special intervention, and by 
telegraphing for them to the arriving train. We ac- 
cepted his romantic theory of the case, and paid the 
bonus due the railroad agent in the hotel for his offices 
in the matter ; we would have given anything, we were 
so eager to get out of Burgos before we were frozen 
up there. I do not know that we were either sur- 
prised or pained to find that our Chilian friends should 

51 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

have got seats in the same car without anything of our 
diplomacy, by the simple process of showing their 
tickets. I think our little interpreter was worth every- 
thing he cost, and more. I would not have lost a 
moment of his company as he stood on the platform 
with me, adding one artless invention to another for 
my pleasure, and successively extracting peseta after 
peseta from me till he had made up the sum which 
he had doubtless idealized as a just reward for his half- 
day's service when he first told me that it should be 
what I pleased. We parted with the affection of 
fellow-citizens in a strange monarchical country, his 
English growing less and less as the train delayed, and 
his eyes watering more and more as with tears of corn- 
patriotic affection. At the moment I could have envied 
that German princess her ability to make sure of his 
future companionship at the low cost of fifty pesetas a 
day; and even now, when my affection has had time 
to wane, I cannot do less than commend him to any 
future visitor at Burgos, as in the last degree amiable, 
and abounding in surprises of intelligence and unex- 
pected feats of reliability. 






IV 
THE VAEIETY OF VALLADOLID 

When you leave Burgos at 3.29 of a passably sunny 
afternoon you are not at once aware of the moral dif- 
ference between the terms of your approach and those 
of your departure. You are not changing your earth 
or your sky very much, but it is not long before you 
are sensible of a change of mind which insists more 
and more. There is the same long ground-swell of 
wheat-fields, but yesterday you were followed in vision 
by the loveliness of the frugal and fertile Biscayan 
farms, and to-day this vision has left you, and you are 
running farther and farther into the economic and topo- 
graphic waste of Castile. Yesterday there were more 
or less agreeable shepherdesses in pleasant plaids scat- 
tered over the landscape; to-day there are only shep- 
herds of three days' unshornness ; the plaids are ragged, 
and there is not sufficient compensation in the caval- 
cades of both men and women riding donkeys in and 
out of the horizons on the long roads that lose and find 
themselves there. Flocks of brown and black goats, 
looking large as cows among the sparse stubble, do 
little to relieve the scene from desolation; I am not 
sure but goats, when brown and black, add to the horror 
of a desolate scene. There are no longer any white 
farmsteads, or friendly villages gathering about high- 
shouldered churches, but very far away to the eastward 

or westward the dun expanse of the wheat-lands is 

53 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TEAVELS 

roughed with something which seems a cluster of muddy 
protuberances, so like the soil at first it is not distin- 
guishable from it, but which as your train passes nearer 
proves to be a town at the base of tablelands, without 
a tree or a leaf or any spear of green to endear it to 
the eye as the abode of living men. You pull yourself 
together in the effort to visualize the immeasurable 
fields washing those dreary towns with golden tides of 
harvest; but it is difficult. What you cannot help see- 
ing is the actual nakedness of the land which with its 
spindling stubble makes you think of that awful mo- 
ment of the human head, when utter baldness will be a 
relief to the spectator. 



At times and in places, peasants were scratching the 
dismal surfaces with the sort of plows which Abel must 
have used, when subsoiling was not yet even a dream ; 
and between the plowmen and their ox-teams it seemed 
a question as to which should loiter longest in the un- 
finished furrow. Now and then the rush of the train 
gave a motionless goatherd, with his gaunt flock, an 
effect of comparative celerity to the rearward. The 
women riding their donkeys over 

The level waste, the rounding gray 

in the distance were the only women we saw except 
those who seemed to be keeping the stations, and one 
very fat one who came to the train at a small town 
and gabbled volubly to some passenger who made no 
audible response. She excited herself, but failed to 
rouse the interest of the other partv to the interview, 

54 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

who remained unseen as well as unheard. I could the 
more have wished to know what it was all about be- 
cause nothing happened on board the train to distract 
the mind from the joyless landscape until we drew 
near Valladolid. It is true that for a while we shared 
our compart i :ent with a father and his two sons who 
lunched on • 3 ices of the sausage which seems the fa- 
vorite refection of the Latin as well as the Germanic 
races in their travels. But this drama was not of in- 
tense interest, and we grappled in vain with the ques- 
tion of our companions' social standard. The father, 
while he munched his bread and sausage, read a news- 
paper which did not rank him or even define his poli- 
tics; there was a want of fashion in the cut of the 
young men's clothes and of freshness in the polish of 
their tan shoes which defied conjecture. When they 
left the train without the formalities of leave-taking 
which had hitherto distinguished our Spanish fellow- 
travelers, we willingly abandoned them to a sort of 
middling obscurity; but this may not really have been 
their origin or their destiny. 

That spindling sparseness, worse than utter baldness, 
of the wheat stubble now disappeared with cinematic 
suddenness, and our train was running past stretches 
of vineyard, where, among the green and purple and 
yellow ranks, the vintagers, with their donkeys and 
carts, were gathering the grapes in the paling light of 
the afternoon. Again the scene lacked the charm of 
woman's presence which the vintage had in southern 
France. In Spain we nowhere saw the women sharing 
the outdoor work of the men; and we fancied their 
absence the effect of the Oriental jealousy lingering 
from centuries ofMoorish domination ; though we could 
not entirely reconcile our theory with the publicity of 
their washing clothes at every stream. To be sure, that 

55' 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

was work which they did not share with men any more 
than the men shared the labor of the fields with them. 

It was still afternoon, well before sunset, when we 
arrived at Valladolid, where one of the quaintest of our 
Spanish surprises awaited us. We knew that the omni- 
bus of the hotel we had chosen would be the shabbiest 
omnibus at the station, and we saw without great alarm 
our Chilian friends drive off in an indefinitely finer 
vehicle. But what we were not prepared for was the 
fact of octroi at Valladolid, and for the strange be- 
havior of the local customs officer who stopped us on 
our way into the town. He looked a very amiable 
young man as he put his face in at the omnibus door, 
and he received without explicit question our declara- 
tion that we had nothing taxable in our trunks. Then, 
however, he mounted to the top of the omnibus and 
thumped our trunks about as if to test them for contra- 
band by the sound. The investigation continued on 
these strange terms until the officer had satisfied him- 
self of our good faith, when he got down and with a 
friendly smile at the window bowed us into Valladolid. 

In its way nothing could have been more charming ; 
and we rather liked being left by the omnibus about 
a block from our hotel, on the border of a sort of prom- 
enade where no vehicles were allowed. We had been 
halted near a public fountain, where already the moth- 
ers and daughters of the neighborhood were gathered 
with earthen jars for the night's supply of water. The 
jars were not so large as to overburden any of them 
Avhen, after just delay for exchange of gossip, the girls 
and goodwives put them on their heads and marched 
erectly away with them, each beautifully picturesque 
irrespective of her age or looks. 

The air was soft, and after Burgos, warm ; something 

southern, unfelt before, began to qualify the whole 

56 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

scene, which as the evening fell grew more dramatic, 
and made the promenade the theater of emotions per- 
mitted such unrestricted play nowhere else in Spain, 
so far as we were witness. On one side the place was 
arcaded, and bordered with little shops, not so obtrusive- 
ly brilliant that the young people who walked up and 
down before them were in a glare of publicity. A little 
way off the avenue expanded into a fine oblong place, 
where some first martyrs of the Inquisition were burned. 
But the promenaders kept well short of this, as they 
walked up and down, and talked, talked, talked in that 
inexhaustible interest which youth takes in itself the 
world over. They were in the standard proportion of 
two girls to one young man, or, if here and there a girl 
had an undivided young man to herself, she went be- 
fore some older maiden or matron whom she left alto- 
gether out of the conversation. They mostly wore the 
skirts and hats of Paris, and if the scene of the fountain 
was Arabically oriental the promenade was almost 
Americanly occidental. The promenaders were there 
by hundreds; they filled the avenue from side to side, 
and 

The delight of happy laughter 

The delight of low replies 

that rose from their progress, with the chirp and 
whisper of their feet cheered the night as long as we 
watched and listened from the sun balcony of our hotel. 



ii 

\ There was no more heat in the radiators of the hotel 

there than at Burgos, but for that evening at least there 

was none needed. It was the principal hotel of Vallado- 

lid, and the unscrubbed and unswept staircase by which 

57 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

we mounted into it was merely a phase of that genial 
pause, as for second thought, in the march of progress 
which marks so much of the modern advance in Spain, 
and was by no means an evidence of arrested develop- 
ment. We had the choice of reaching our rooms either 
through the dining-room or by a circuitous detour past 
the pantries ; but our rooms had a proud little vestibule 
of their own, with a balcony over the great square, and 
if one of them had a belated feather-bed the other had 
a new hair mattress, and the whole house was bril- 
liantly lighted with electricity. As for the cooking, 
it was delicious, and the table was of an abundance and 
variety which might well have made one ashamed of 
paying so small a rate as two dollars a day for bed and 
board, wine included, and very fair wine at that. 

In Spain you must take the bad with the good, for 
whether you get the good or not you are sure of the 
bad, but only very exceptionally are you sure of the 
bad only. It was a pleasure not easily definable to 
find our hotel managed by a mother and two daughters, 
who gave the orders obeyed by the men-servants, and 
did not rebuke them for joining in the assurance that 
when we got used to going so abruptly from the dining- 
room into our bedrooms we would like it. The elder 
of the daughters had some useful French, and neither 
of the younger ladies ever stayed for some ultimate 
details of dishabille in coming to interpret the mother 
and ourselves to one another when we encountered her 
alone in the office. They were all thoroughly kind 
and nice, and they were supported with surpassing in- 
telligence and ability by the cTiico, a radiant boy of 
ten, who united in himself the functions whicH the 
amiable inefficiency of the porters and waiters aban- 
doned to him. 

\When we came out to dinner after settling ourselves 

58 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

in our almost obtrusively accessible rooms, we were 
convinced of the wisdom of our choice of a hotel by 
finding our dear Chilians at one of the tables. We 
rushed together like two kindred streams of transat- 
lantic gaiety, and in our mingled French, Spanish, and 
English possessed one another of our doubts and fears 
in coming to our common conclusion. We had already 
seen a Spanish gentleman whom we knew as a fellow- 
sufferer at Burgos, roaming the streets of Valladolid, 
and in what seemed a disconsolate doubt, interrogating 
the windows of our hotel ; and now we learned from 
the Chilians that he had been bitterly disappointed in 
the inn which a patrician omnibus had borne him away 
to from our envious eyes at the station. We learned 
that our South American compatriots had found their 
own chosen hotel impossible, and were now lodged in 
rapturous satisfaction under our roof. Their happiness 
penetrated us with a glow of equal content, and con- 
firmed us in the resolution always to take the worst 
omnibus at a Spanish station as the sure index of the 
best hotel. 
i The street-cars, which in Valladolid are poetically 
propelled through lyre-shaped trolleys instead of our 
prosaic broomstick appliances, groaned unheeded if not 
unheard under our windows through the night, and we 
woke to find the sun on duty in our glazed balcony 
and the promenade below already astir with life: not 
the exuberant young life of the night before, but still 
sufficiently awake to be recognizable as life. A crippled 
newsboy seated under one of the arcades was crying 
his papers; an Englishman was looking at a plan of 
Valladolid in a shop window; a splendid cavalry officer 
wont by in braided uniform, and did not stare so hard 
as they might have expected at some ladies passing 
in mantillas to mass or market. In the late afternoon 
5 59 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TKAVELS 

as well as the early morning we saw a good deal of the 
military in Valladolid, where an army corps is sta- 
tioned. From time to time a company of infantry 
marched through the streets to gay music, and toward 
evening slim young officers began to frequent the 
arcades and glass themselves in the windows of the 
shops, their spurs clinking on the pavement as they 
lounged by or stopped and took distinguished attitudes. 
We speculated in vain as to their social quality, and 
to this day I do not know whether " the career is open 
to the talents " in the Spanish army, or whether mili- 
tary rank is merely the just reward of civil rank. 
Those beautiful young swells in riding-breeches and 
tight gray jackets approached an Italian type of cav- 
alry officer; they did not look very vigorous, and the 
common soldiers we saw marching through the streets, 
largely followed by the populace, were not of formi- 
dable stature or figure, though neat and agreeable 
enough to the eye. 



in 



While I indulge the record of these trivialities; 

which I am by no means sure the reader will care 

for so much, I feel that it would be wrong to let him 

remain as ignorant of the history of Valladolid as I 

was while there. My ignorance was not altogether my 

fault ; I had fancied easily finding at some bookseller's 

under the arcade a little sketch of the local history 

such as you are sure of finding in any Italian town, 

done by a local antiquary of those always mousing in 

the city's archives. But the bookseller's boy and then 

the boy's mother could not at first imagine my wish, 

and when they did they could only supply me with a 

sort of business directorv, full of addresses and adver- 

60 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

tisements. So instead of overflowing with informa- 
tion when we set out on our morning ramble, we meager- 
ly knew from the guide-books that Valladolid had once 
been the capital of Castile, and after many generations 
of depression following the removal of the court, had 
in these latest days renewed its strength in mercantile 
and industrial prosperity. There are ugly evidences 
of the prosperity in the windy, dusty avenues and streets 
of the more modern town ; but there are lanes and alleys 
enough, groping for the churches and monuments in 
suddenly opening squares, to console the sentimental 
tourist for the havoc which enterprise has made. The 
mind readily goes back through these to the palmy 
prehistoric times from which the town emerged to men- 
tion in Ptolemy, and then begins to work forward past 
Iberian and Roman and Goth and Moor to the Castilian 
kings who made it their residence in the eleventh cen- 
tury. The capital won its first great distinction when 
Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Oastile were 
married there in 1469. Thirty-five years later these 
Catholic Kings, as one had better learn at once to call 
them in Spain, let Columbus die neglected if not for- 
gotten in the house recently pulled down, where he 
had come to dwell in their cold shadow; they were 
much occupied with other things and they could not 
realize that his discovery of America was the great 
glory of their reign; probably they thought the con- 
quest of Granada was. Later yet, by twenty years, the 
dreadful Philip II. was born in Valladolid, and in 
1559 a very famous auto da fe was celebrated in the 
Plaza Mayor. Fourteen Lutherans were burned alive 
for their heresy, and the body of a woman suspected of 
imperfect orthodoxy after her death was exhumed and 
burned with them. In spite of such precautions as 

these, and of all the pious diligence of the Holy Office, 

61 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

the reader will hardly believe that there is now a Span- 
ish Protestant church in Valladolid; but such is the 
fact, though whether it derives from the times of the 
Inquisition, or is a modern missionary church I do not 
know. That auto da fe was of the greatest possible 
distinction; the Infanta Juana presided, and the uni- 
versal interest was so great that people paid a dollar 
and twenty-five cents a seat; money then worth five or 
six times as much as now. Philip himself came to 
another auto when thirteen persons were burned in 
the same place, and he always liked Valladolid ; it must 
have pleased him in a different way from Escorial, 
lying flat as it does on a bare plain swept, but never 
thoroughly dusted, by winds that blow pretty constantly 
over it. 

While the Inquisition was purging the city of error 
its great university was renowning it not only through- 
out Spain, but in France and Italy ; students frequented 
it from those countries, and artists came from many 
parts of Europe. Literature also came in the person 
of Cervantes, who seems to have followed the Spanish 
court in its migrations from Valladolid to Toledo and 
then to Madrid. Here also came one of the greatest 
characters in fiction, for it was in Valladolid that Gil 
Bias learned to practise the art of medicine under the 
instruction of the famous Dr. Sangrado. 



IV 

I put these facts at the service of the reader for 
what use he will while he goes with us to visit the 
cathedral in Valladolid, a cathedral as unlike that of 
Burgos as the severest mood of Spanish renaissance can 
render it. In fact, it is the work of Herrera, the archi- 
tect who made the Escorial so grim, and is the expres- 



mm 




A STREET LEADING TO THE CATHEDRAL 



THE VAKIETY OF VALLADOLID 

sion in large measure of his austere mastery. If it 
Lad ever been finished it might have been quite as 
dispiriting as the Escorial, but as it has only one of 
the four ponderous towers it was meant to have, it is 
not without its alleviations, especially as the actual 
tower was rebuilt after the fall of the original seventy 
years ago. The grass springs cheerfully up in the 
crevices of the flagging from which the broken steps 
falter to the portal, but within all is firm and solid. 
The interior is vast, and nowhere softened by decoration, 
but the space is reduced by the huge bulk of the choir 
in the center of it ; as we entered a fine echo mounted 
to the cathedral roof from the chanting and intoning 
within. When the service ended a tall figure in scarlet 
crossed rapidly toward the sacristy. It was of such 
imposing presence that we resolved at once it must be 
the figure of a cardinal, or of an archbishop at the least. 
But it proved to be one of the sacristans, and when 
we followed him to the sacristy with half a dozen other 
sightseers, he showed Us a silver monstrance weighing 
a hundred and fifty pounds and decked with statues of 
our first parents as they appeared before the Fall. Be- 
sides this we saw, much against our will, a great many 
ecclesiastical vestments of silk and damask richly 
wrought in gold and silver. But if we were reluctant 
there was a little fat priest there who must have seen 
them hundreds of times and had still a childish delight 
in seeing them again because he had seen them so often ; 
he dimpled and smiled, and for his sake we pretended 
a joy in them which it would have been cruel to deny 
him. I suppose we were then led to the sacrifice at 
the several side altars, but I have no specific recollection 
of them ; I know there was a pale, sick-looking young 
girl in white who went about with her father, and moved 
compassion by her gentle sorrowfulness. 

63 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

Of the University, which we visited next, I recall 
only the baroque f agade ; the interior was in reparation 
and I do not know whether it would have indemnified 
us for not visiting the University of Salamanca. That 
was in our list, but the perversity of the time-table 
forbade. You could go to Salamanca, yes, but you 
could not come back except at two o'clock in the morn- 
ing; you could indeed continue on to Lisbon, but per- 
haps you did not wish to see Lisbon. A like perversity 
of the time-table, once universal in Spain, but now much 
reformed, also kept us away from Segovia, which was 
on our list. But our knowledge of it enabled us to tell 
a fellow-countrywoman whom we presently met in the 
museum of the University, how she could best, or 
worst, get to that city. Our speech gave us away to 
her, and she turned to us from the other objects of 
interest to explain first that she was in a hotel whore 
she paid only six pesetas a day, but where she could get 
no English explanation of the time-table for any money. 
She had come to Valladolid with a friend who was 
going next day to Salamanca, but next day was Sun- 
day and she did not like to travel on Sunday, and 
Segovia seemed the only alternative. We could not 
make out why, or if it came to that why she should 
be traveling alone through Spain with such a slender 
equipment of motive or object, but we perceived she was 
one of the most estimable souls in the world, and if she 
cared more for getting to Segovia that afternoon than 
for looking at the wonders of the place where we were, 
we could not blame her. We had to leave her when 
we left the museum in the charge of two custodians 
who led her, involuntary but unresisting, to an upper 
chamber where there were some pictures which she 
could care no more for than for the wood carvings below. 

We ourselves cared so little for those pictures that 
64 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

we would not go to see them. Pictures you can see 
anywhere, but not statuary of such singular interest, 
such transcendant powerfulness as those carvings of 
Berruguete and other masters less known, which held 
us fascinated in the lower rooms of the museum. They 
are the spoil of convents in the region about, suppressed 
by the government at different times, and collected here 
with little relevancy to their original appeal. Some 
are Scriptural subjects and some are figures of the 
dancers who take part in certain ceremonials of the 
Spanish churches (notably the cathedral at Seville), 
which have a quaint reality, an intense personal char- 
acter. They are of a fascination which I can hope 
to convey by no phrase of mine; but far beyond this 
is the motionless force, the tremendous repose of the 
figures of the Roman soldiers taken in the part of sleep- 
ing at the Tomb. These sculptures are in wood, life- 
size, and painted in the colors of flesh and costume, 
with every detail and of a strong mass in which the 
detail is lost and must be found again by the wondering 
eye. Beyond all other Spanish sculptures they seemed 
to me expressive of the national temperament ; I thought 
no other race could have produced them, and that in 
their return to the Greek ideal of color in statuary they 
were ingenuously frank and unsurpassably bold. 



It might have been the exhaustion experienced from 

the encounter with their strenuousness that suddenly 

fatigued us past even the thought of doing any more 

of Valladolid on foot. At any rate, when we came out 

of the museum we took refuge in a corner groceiy (it 

Beems the nature of groceries to seek corners the world 

over) and asked the grocer whore we could find a cab. 

65 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TEAVELS 

The grocer was young and kind, and not so busy but 
be could give willing attention to our case. He said 
he would send for a cab, and he called up from his 
hands and knees a beautiful blond half-grown boy who 
was scrubbing the floor, and despatched him on this 
errand, first making him wipe the suds off his hands. 
The boy was back wonderfully soon to say the cab 
would come for us in ten minutes, and to receive with 
self-respectful appreciation the peseta which rewarded 
his promptness. In the mean time we feigned a small 
need which we satisfied by a purchase, and then the 
grocer put us chairs in front of his counter and made 
us his guests while his other customers came and went. 
They came oftener than they went, for our interest in 
them did not surpass their interest in us. We felt 
that through this we reflected credit upon our amiable 
host; rumors of the mysterious strangers apparently 
spread through the neighborhood and the room was soon 
filled with people who did not all come to buy; but those 
who did buy were the most interesting. An elderly 
man with his wife bought a large bottle which the 
grocer put into one scale of his balance, and poured 
its weight in chick-peas into the other. Then he filled 
the bottle with oil and weighed it, and then he gave 
the peas along with it to his customers. It seemed a 
pretty convention, though we could not quite make 
out its meaning, unless the peas were bestowed as a 
sort of bonus; but the next convention was clearer to 
us. An old man in black corduroy with a clean-shaven 
face and a rather fierce, retired bull-fighter air, bought 
a whole dried stock-fish (which the Spaniards eat in- 
stead of salt cod) talking loudly to the grocer and at 
us while the grocer cut it across in widths of two inches 
and folded it into a neat pocketful ; then a glass of 
wine was poured from a cask behind the counter, and 




. /.?»/., i- /i/„ c/ 



THE UNIVERSITY OP VALLADOTJD 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

the customer drank it off in honor of the transaction 
with the effect also of pledging us with his keen eyes ; 
all the time he talked, and he was joined in conversa- 
tion by a very fat woman who studied us not unkindly. 
Other neighbors who had gathered in had no apparent 
purpose but to verify our outlandish presence and to 
hear my occasional Spanish, which was worth hearing 
if for nothing but the effort it cost me. The grocer 
accepted with dignity the popularity we had won him, 
and when at last our cab arrived from Mount Ararat 
with the mire of the subsiding Deluge encrusted upon 
it he led us out to it through the small boys who 
swarmed upon us wherever we stopped or started in 
Valladolid; and whose bulk was now much increased 
by the coming of that. very fat woman from within the 
grocery. As the morning was bright we proposed hav- 
ing the top opened, but here still another convention 
of the place intervened. In Valladolid it seems that 
no self-respecting cabman will open the top of his cab 
for an hour's drive, and we could not promise to keep 
ours longer. The grocer waited the result of our parley, 
and then he opened our carriage door and bowed us 
away. It was charming; if he had a place on Sixth 
Avenue I would be his customer as long as I lived in 
'New York; and to this moment I do not understand 
why I did not bargain with that blond boy to come to 
America with us and be with us always. But there 
was no city I visited in Spain where I was not sorry 
to leave some boy behind with the immense rabble of 
boys whom I hoped never to see again. 



VI 

After this passage of real life it was not easy to 
sink again to the level of art, but if we must come 

67 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

down it there could have been no descent less jarring 
than that which left us in the exquisite patio of the 
College of San Gregorio, founded for poor students 
of theology in the time of the Catholic Kings. The 
students who now thronged the place inside and out 
looked neither clerical nor poverty-stricken ; but I dare 
say they were good Christians, and whatever their con- 
dition they were rich in the constant vision of beauty 
which one sight of seemed to us more than we merited. 
Perhaps the f agade of the college and that of the neigh- 
boring Church of San Pablo may be elsewhere sur- 
passed in the sort of sumptuous delicacy of that Gothic 
which gets its name of plateresque from the silversmith? 
ing spirit of its designs; but I doubt it. The wonder- 
fulness of it is that it is not mechanical or monotonous 
like the stucco fretting of the Moorish decoration which 
people rave over in Spain, but has a strength in its re- 
finement which comes from its expression in the ex- 
quisitely carven marble. When this is grayed with 
age it is indeed of the effect of old silver work; but 
the plateresque in Valladolid does not suggest fragility 
or triviality; its grace is perhaps rather feminine than 
masculine; but at the worst it is only the ultimation 
of the decorative genius of the Gothic. It is, at any 
rate, the finest surprise which the local architecture 
has to offer and it leaves one wishing for more rather 
than less of it, so that after the facade of San Gregorio 
one is glad of it again in the walls of the patio, whose 
staircases and galleries, with the painted wooden beams 
of their ceilings, scarcely tempt the eye from it. 

x We thought the front of San Pablo deserved a second 
visit, and we were rewarded by finding it far lovelier 
than we thought. The church was open, and when we 
went in we had the advantage of seeing a large silver- 
gilt car moved from the high altar down the nave to 

68 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

a side altar next the door, probably for use in some 
public procession. The tongue of the car was pulled 
by a man with one leg; a half -grown boy under the 
body of it hoisted it on his back and eased it along; 
and a monk with his white robe tucked up into his 
girdle pushed it powerfully from behind. I did not 
make out why so strange a team should have been em- 
ployed for the work, but the spectacle of that quaint 
progress was unique among my experiences at Vallado- 
lid and of a value which I wish I could make the reader 
feel with me. We ourselves were so interested in the 
event that we took part in it so far as to push aside a 
bench that blocked the way, and we received a grateful 
smile from the monk in reward of our zeal. 
\ We were in the mOod for simple kindness because 
of our stiff official reception at the Royal Palace, which 
we visited in the gratification of our passion for patios. 
It is now used for provincial or municipal offices and 
guarded by sentries who indeed admitted us to the 
courtyard, but would not understand our wish (it was 
not very articulately expressed) to mount to the cloi- 
stered galleries which all the guide-books united in 
pronouncing so noble, with their decorative busts of the 
Roman Emperors and arms of the Spanish provinces. 
The sculptures are by the school of Berruguete, for 
whom we had formed so strong a taste at the museum; 
but our disappointment was not at the moment further 
embittered by knowing that Napoleon resided there in 
1S00. We made what we could of other patios in the 
vicinity, especially of one in the palace across from 
Ban Gregorio, to which the liveried porter welcomed 
us, though the noble family was in residence, and al- 
lowed us to mount the red-carpeted staircase t<> a closed 
porta] In consideration of the peseta which he correctly 
foresaw. It was not a very characteristic 'patio, bare 

(5!) 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

of flower and fountain as it was, and others more fully 
appointed did not entirely satisfy us. The fact is the 
patio is to be seen best in Andalusia, its home, where 
every house is built round it, and in summer cooled 
and in winter chilled by it. But if we were not willing 
to wait for Seville, Valladolid did what it could; and 
if we saw no house with quite the patio we expected 
we did see the house where Philip II. was born, mil ess 
the enterprising boy who led us to it was mistaken ; 
in that case we were, Ophelia-like, the more deceived. 



VII 



Such things do not really matter; the guide-book's 
object of interest is seldom an object of human inter- 
est ; you may miss it or ignore it without real personal 
loss ; but if we had failed of that mystic progress of the 
silver car down the nave of San Pablo we should have 
been really if not sensibly poorer. So we should if 
we had failed of the charming experience which awaited 
ns in our hotel at lunch-time. When we went out in 
the morning we saw a table spread the length of the 
long dining-room, and now when we returned we found 
every chair taken. At once we surmised a wedding 
breakfast, not more from the gaiety than the gravity 
of the guests; and the head waiter confirmed our im- 
pression: it was indeed a boda. The party was just 
breaking up, and as we sat down at our table the wed- 
ding guests rose from theirs. I do not know but in 
any country the women on such an occasion would look 
more adequate to it than the men ; at any rate, there 
in Spain they looked altogether superior. It was not 
only that they were handsomer and better dressed, but 

that they expressed finer social and intellectual quality. 

70 







/ /Di/lfJC. 71LAC. 



CHURCH OF BAN PABLO 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

All the faces had the quiet which the Spanish face has 
in such degree that the quiet seems national more than 
personal; but the women's faces were oval, though 
rather heavily based, while the men's were squared, with 
high cheek-bones, and they seemed more distinctly 
middle class. Men and women had equally repose of 
manner, and when the women came to put on their 
headgear near our corner, it was with a surface calm 
unbroken by what must have been their inner excite- 
ment. They wore hats and mantillas in about the same 
proportion ; but the bride wore a black mantilla and a 
black dress with sprigs of orange blossoms in her hair 
and on her breast for the only note of white. Her love- 
ly, gentle face was white, of course, from the universal 
powder, and so were the faces of the others, who talked 
in low tones around her, with scarcely more animation 
than so many masks. The handsomest of them, whom 
we decided to be her sister, arranged the bride's man- 
tilla, and was then helped on with hers by the others, 
with soft smiles and glances. Two little girls, imagin- 
ably sorry the feast was over, suppressed their regret in 
the tutelage of the maiden aunts and grandmothers who 
put up cakes in napkins to carry home; and then the 
party vanished in unbroken decorum. When they were 
gone we found that in studying the behavior of the bride 
and her friends we had not only failed to identify the 
bridegroom, but had altogether forgotten to try. 



VIII 

The terrible Torquemada dwelt for years in Valla- 

dolid and must there have excogitated some of the 

methods of the Holy Office in dealing with heresy. As 

I have noted, Ferdinand and Isabella were married 

there and Philip II. was born there; but I think the 

71 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

reader will agree with me that the highest honor of 
the city is that it was long the home of the gallant 
gentleman who after five years of captivity in Algiers 
and the loss of his hand in the Battle of Lepanto, wrote 
there, in his poverty and neglect, the first part of a 
romance which remains and must always remain one 
of the first if not the very first of the fictions of the 
world. I mean that 

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, 

Michael Cervantes; and I wish I could pay here that 
devoir to his memory and fame which squalid circum- 
stance forbade me to render under the roof that once 
sheltered him. One can never say enough in his praise, 
and even Valladolid seems to have thought so, for the 
city has put up a tablet to him with his bust above 
it in the front of his incredible house and done him 
the homage of a reverent inscription. It is a very little 
house, as small as Ariosto's in Eerrara, which he said 
was so apt for him, but it is not in a long, clean street 
like that; it is in a bad neighborhood which has not 
yet outlived the evil repute it bore in the days of Cer- 
vantes. It was then the scene of nightly brawls and 
in one of these a gentleman was stabbed near the au- 
thor's house. The alarm brought Cervantes to the door 
and being the first to reach the dying man he was 
promptly arrested, together with his wife, his two sis- 
ters, and his niece, who were living with him and who 
were taken up as accessories before the fact. The 
whole abomination is matter of judicial record, and 
it appears from this that suspicion fell upon the gentle 
family (one sister was a nun) because they were living 
in that infamous place. The man whose renown has 
since filled the civilized world fuller even than the 

name of his contemporary, Shakespeare (they died on 

72 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

the same day), was then so unknown to the authorities 
of Valladolid that he had great ado to establish the 
innocence of himself and his household. To be sure, 
his Don Quixote had not yet appeared, though he is 
said to have finished the first part in that miserable 
abode in that vile region; but he had written poems 
and plays, especially his most noble tragedy of " Eu- 
mancia," and he had held public employs and lived 
near enough to courts to be at least in their cold shade. 
It is all very Spanish and very strange, and perhaps 
the wonder should be that in this most provincial of 
royal capitals, in a time devoted to the extirpation of 
ideas, the fact that he was a poet and a scholar did 
not tell fatally against him. In his declaration before 
the magistrates he says that his literary reputation 
procured him the acquaintance of courtiers and scholars, 
who visited him in that pitiable abode where the ladies 
of his family cared for themselves and him with the 
help of one servant maid. 

They had an upper floor of the house, which stands 
at the base of a stone terrace dropping from the wide, 
dusty, fly-blown street, where I stayed long enough to 
buy a melon (I was always buying a melon in Spain) 
and put it into my cab before I descended the terrace 
to revere the house of Cervantes on its own level. There 
was no mistaking it; there was the bust and the in- 
scription; but it was well I bought my melon before 
I ventured upon this act of piety; I should not have 
had the stomach for it afterward. I was not satisfied 
with the outside of the house, but when I entered the 
open doorway, meaning to mount to the upper floor, it 
was as if I were immediately blown into the street 
again by the thick and noisome stench which filled the 
place from some unmentionable if not unimaginable 
source. 

73 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

\ It was like a filthy insult to the great presence whose 
sacred shrine the house should have been religiously 
kept. But Cervantes dead was as forgotten in Vallado- 
lid as Cervantes living had been. In some paroxysm 
of civic pride the tablet had been set in the wall and 
then the house abandoned to whatever might happen. 
I thought foul shame of Valladolid for her neglect, 
and though she might have answered that her burden 
of memories was more than she could bear, that she 
could not be forever keeping her celebrity sweet, still 
I could have retorted, But Cervantes, but Cervantes! 
There was only one Cervantes in the world and there 
never would be another, and could not she watch over 
this poor once home of his for his matchless sake? 
Then if Valladolid had come back at me with the fact 
that Cervantes had lived pretty well all over Spain, 
and what had Seville done, Cordova done, Toledo done, 
Madrid done, for the upkeep of his divers sojourns 
more than she had done, after placing a tablet in his 
house wall ? — certainly I could have said that this did 
not excuse her, but I must have owned that she was 
not alone, though she seemed most to blame. 



IX 



Now I look back and am glad I had not consciously 
with me, as we drove away, the boy who once meant 
to write the life of Cervantes, and who I knew from 
my recollection of his idolatry of that chief of Span- 
iards would not have listened to the excuses of Vallado- 
lid for a moment. All appeared fair and noble in 
that Spain of his which shone with such allure far 
across the snows through which he trudged morning and 

evening with his father to and from the printing-office, 

74 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

and made his dream of that great work the common 
theme of their talk. "Now the boy is as utterly gone 
as the father, who was a boy too at heart, but who died 
a very old man many years ago; and in the place of 
both is another old man trammeled in his tangled mem- 
ories of Spain visited and unvisited. 

\It would be a poor sort of make-believe if this sur- 
vivor pretended any lasting indignation with Vallado- 
lid because of the stench of Cervantes's house. There 
are a great many very bad smells in Spain everywhere, 
and it is only fair to own that a psychological change 
toward Valladolid had been operating itself in me 
since luncheon which Valladolid was not very specifical- 
ly to blame for. Up to the time the wedding guests 
left us we had said Valladolid was the most interesting 
city we had ever seen, and we would like to stay there 
a week; then, suddenly, we began to turn against it. 
One thing : the weather had clouded, and it was colder. 
But we determined to be just, and after we left the 
house of Cervantes we drove out to the promenades 
along the banks of the Pisuerga, in hopes of a better 
mind, for we had read that they were the favorite re- 
sort of the citizens in summer, and we did not know 
but even in autumn we might have some glimpses of 
their recreation. Our way took us sorrowfully past 
hospitals and prisons and barracks; and when we came 
out on the promenade we found ourselves in the gloom 
of close set mulberry trees, with the dust thick on the 
paths under them. The leaves hung leaden gray on 
the boughs and there could never have been a spear 
of grass along those disconsolate ways. The river was 
shrunken in its bed, and where its current crept from 
pool to pool, women were washing some of the rags 
which already hung so thick on the bushes that it was 
wonderful there should be any left to wash*. Squalid 
6 75 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TEAVELS 

children abounded, and at one point a crowd of people 
had gathered and stood looking silently and motionless- 
ly over the bank. We looked too and on a sand-bar 
near the shore we saw three gendarmes standing with 
a group of civilians. Between their fixed and abso- 
lutely motionless figures lay the body of a drowned 
man on the sand, poorly clothed in a workman's dress, 
and with his poor, dead clay-white hands stretched out 
from him on the sand, and his gray face showing to 
the sky. Everywhere people were stopping and star- 
ing; from one of the crowded windows of the nearest 
house a woman hung with a rope of her long hair in 
one hand, and in the other the brush she was passing 
over it. On the bridge the man who had found the 
body made a merit of his discovery which he dramatized 
to a group of spectators without rousing them to a 
murmur or stirring them from their statuesque fixity. 
His own excitement in comparison seemed indecent. 



It was now three o'clock and I thought I might be 
in time to draw some money on my letter of credit, at 
the bank which we had found standing in a pleasant 
garden in the course of our stroll through the town the 
night before. We had said, How charming it would 
be to draw money in such an environment; and full 
of the romantic expectation, I offered my letter at the 
window, where after a discreet interval I managed to 
call from their preoccupation some unoccupied persons 
within. They had not a very financial air, and I 
thought them the porters they really were, with some 
fear that I had come after banking-hours. But they 
joined in reassuring me, and told me that if I would 

76 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

return after five o'clock the proper authorities would 
be there. 

\ I did not know then what late hours Spain kept in 
every way; but I concealed my surprise; and I came 
back at the time suggested, and offered my letter at 
the window with a request for ten pounds, which I 
fancied I might need. A clerk took the letter and 
scrutinized it with a deliberation which I thought it 
scarcely merited. His self-respect doubtless would not 
suffer him to betray that he could not read the English 
of it; and with an air of wishing to consult higher 
authority he carried it to another clerk at a desk across 
the room. To this official it seemed to come as some- 
thing of a blow. He made a show of reading it several 
times over, inside and out, and then from the pigeon- 
hole of his desk he began to accumulate what I supposed 
corroborative documents, or pieces justificatives. When 
he had amassed a heap several inches thick, he rose 
and hurried out through the gate, across the hall where 
I sat, into a room beyond. He returned without in 
any wise referring himself to me and sat down at his 
desk again. The first clerk explained to the anxious 
face with which I now approached him that the second 
clerk had taken my letter to the director. I went back 
to my seat and waited fifteen minutes longer, fifteen 
having passed already; then I presented my anxious 
face, now somewhat indignant, to the first clerk again. 
" What is the director doing with my letter ?" The 
first clerk referred my question to the second clerk, 
who answered from his place, " He is verifying the 
signature." " But what signature V 9 I wondered to 
myself, reflecting that he had as yet had none of mine. 
Could it be the signature of my New York banker 
or my London one? I repaired once more to the win- 
dow, after another wait, and said in polite but firm 

77 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

Castilian, " Do me the favor to return me my letter." 
A commotion of protest took place within the barrier, 
followed by the repeated explanation that the director 
was verifying the signature. I returned to my place 
and considered that the suspicious document which I 
had presented bore record of moneys drawn in London, 
in Paris, in Tours, in San Sebastian, which ought to 
have allayed all suspicion; then for the last time I 
repaired to the window; more in anger now than in 
sorrow, and gathered my severest Spanish together for 
a final demand : " Do me the favor to give me back 
my letter without the pounds sterling." The clerks 
consulted together; one of them decided to go to the 
director's room, and after a dignified delay he came 
back with my letter, and dashed it down before me with 
the only rudeness I experienced in Spain. 

^1 was glad to get it on any terms; it was only too 
probable that it would have been returned without the 
money if I had not demanded it; and I did what T 
could with the fact that this amusing financial trans- 
action, involving a total of fifty dollars, had taken place 
in the chief banking-house of one of the commercial 
and industrial centers of the country. Valladolid is 
among other works the seat of the locomotive works 
of the northern railway lines, and as these machines 
average a speed of twenty-five miles an hour with ex- 
press trains, it seemed strange to me that something 
like their rapidity should not have governed the action 
of that bank director in forcing me to ask back my 
discredited letter of credit. 



XT 

That evening the young voices and the young feet 
began to chirp again under our sun balconv. But there 

78 



THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID 

had been no sun in it since noon and presently a cold 
thin rain was falling and driving the promenaders 
under the arcades, where they were perhaps not un- 
happier for being closely massed. We missed the 
prettiness of the spectacle, though as yet we did not 
know that it was the only one of the sort we might 
hope to see in Spain, where women walk little indoors, 
and when they go out, drive and increase in the sort of 
loveliness which may be weighed and measured. Even 
under the arcades the promenade ceased early and in 
the adjoining Plaza Mayor, where the autos da fe once 
took place, the rain still earlier made an end of the 
municipal music, and the dancing of the lower ranks 
of the people. But we were fortunate in our Chilian 
friend's representation of the dancing; he came to our 
table at dinner, and did with charming sympathy a 
mother waltzing with her babe in arms for a partner. 

He came to the omnibus at the end of the promenade, 
when we were starting for the station next morning, 
not yet shaven, in his friendly zeal to make sure of 
seeing us off, and we parted with confident prophecies 
of meeting each other again in Madrid. We had al- 
ready bidden adieu with effusion to our landlady-sisters- 
and-mother, and had wished to keep forever our own 
the adorable chico who, when cautioned against trying 
to carry a very heavy bag, valiantly jerked it to his 
shoulder and made off with it to the omnibus, as if it 
were nothing. I do not believe such a boy breathes 
out of Spain, where T hope he will grow up to the 
Oriental calm of so many of his countrymen, and rest 
from the toils of his nonage. At the last moment after 
the Chilian had left us, we perceived that one of our 
trunks Had been forgotten, and the chico coursed back 
to the hotel for it and returned with the delinquent 

porter bearing it, as if to make sure of his bringing it. 

79 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

When it was put on top of the omnibus, and we were 
in probably unparalleled readiness for starting to the 
station, at an hour when scarcely anybody else in 
Valladolid was up, a mule composing a portion of our 
team immediately fell down, as if startled too abruptly 
from a somnambulic dream. I really do not remember 
how it was got to its feet again; but I remember the 
anguish of the delay and the fear that we might not 
be able to escape from Valladolid after all our pains 
in trying for the Sud-Express at that hour; and I 
remember that when we reached the station we found 
that the Sud-Express was forty minutes behind time 
and that we were a full hour after that before starting 
for Madrid. 



V 

PHASES OF MADEID 

I fancied that a kind of Gothic gloom was ex- 
pressed in the black wine-skins of Old Castile, as con- 
trasted with the fairer color of those which began 
to prevail even so little south of Burgos as Valladolid. 
I am not sure that the Old Castilian wine-skins derived 
their blackness from the complexion of the pigs, or that 
there are more pale pigs in the south than in the north 
of Spain ; I am sure only of a difference in the color 
of the skins, which may have come from a difference 
in the treatment of them. At a venture I should not 
say that there were more black pigs in Old Castile 
than in Andalusia, as we observed them from the train, 
rooting among the unpromising stubble of the wheat- 
lands. Rather I should say that the prevailing pig of 
all the Spains was brown, corresponding to the red- 
dish blondness frequent among both the Visigoths and 
the Moors. The black pig was probably the original, 
prehistoric Iberian pig, or of an Italian strain imported 
by the Romans ; but I do not offer this as more than a 
guess. The Visigothic or Arabic pig showed himself 
an animal of great energy and alertness wherever we 
saw him, and able to live upon the lean of the land 
where it was leanest. At his youngest he abounded 
in the furrows and hollows, matching his russet with 
the russet of the soil and darting to and fro with the 

quickness of a hare. He was always of an ingratiating 

81 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

humorousness and endeared himself by an apparent 
readiness to enter into any joke that was going, especial- 
ly that of startling the pedestrian by his own sudden 
apparition from behind a tuft of grass or withered 
stalk. I will not be sure, but I think we began to see 
his kind as soon as we got out of Valladolid, when 
we began running through a country wooded with 
heavy, low-crowned pines that looked like the stone- 
pines of Italy, but were probably not the same. After 
twenty miles of this landscape the brown pig with 
pigs of other complexions, as much guarded as pos- 
sible, multiplied among the patches of vineyard. He 
had there the company of tall black goats and rather 
unhappy-looking black sheep, all of whom he excelled 
in the art of foraging among the vines and the stub- 
ble of the surrounding wheat-lands. After the vine- 
yards these opened and stretched themselves wearily, 
from low dull sky to low dull sky, nowise cheered in 
aspect by the squalid peasants, scratching their tawny 
expanses with those crooked prehistoric sticks which 
they use for plows in Spain. It was a dreary land- 
scape, but it was good to be out of Valladolid on any 
terms, and especially good to be away from the station 
which we had left emulating the odors of the house of 
Cervantes. 



There had been the usual alarm about the lack of 
places in the Sud-Express which we were to take at 
Valladolid, but we chanced getting them, and our bold- 
ness was rewarded by getting a whole compartment 
to ourselves, and a large, fat friendly conductor with 
an eye out for tips in every direction. The lunch in 
our dining-car was for the first time in Spain not worth 



PHASES OF MADRID 

the American price asked for it ; everywhere else on the 
Spanish trains I must testify that the meals were ex- 
cellent and abundant; and the refection may now have 
felt in some obscure sort the horror of the world in 
which the Sud-Express seemed to have lost itself. The 
scene was as alien to any other known aspect of our 
comfortable planet as if it were the landscape of some 
star condemned for the sins of its extinct children to 
wander through space in unimaginable desolation. It 
seldom happens in Spain that the scenery is the same 
on both sides of the railroad track, but here it was 
malignly alike on one hand and on the other, though 
we seemed to be running along the slope of an upland, 
so that the left hand was higher and the right lower. 
It was more as if we were crossing the face of some 
prodigious rapid, whose surges were the measureless 
granite boulders tossing everywhere in masses from the 
size of a man's fist to the size of a house. In a wild 
chaos they wallowed against one another, the greater 
bearing on their tops or between them on their shoulders 
smaller regular or irregular masses of the same gray 
stone. Everywhere among their awful shallows grew 
gray live-oaks, and in among the rocks and trees spread 
tufts of gray shrub. Suddenly, over the frenzy of 
this mad world, a storm of cold rain broke whirling, 
and cold gray mists drove, blinding the windows and 
chilling us where we sat within. Erom time to time 
the storm lifted and showed again this vision of nature 
hoary as if with immemorial eld ; if at times we seemed 
to have run away from it again it closed in upon us 
and held us captive in its desolation. 

With longer and longer intervals of relief it closed 
upon us for the last time in the neighborhood of the 
gloomiest pile that ever a man built for his life, his 
death and his praver between; but before we came to 

83 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

the palace-tomb of the Escorial, we had clear in the 
distance the vision of the walls and roofs and towers 
of the medieval city of Avila. It is said to be the per- 
fectest relic of the Middle Ages after or before Rothen- 
burg, and we who had seen Rothenburg solemnly prom- 
ised ourselves to come back some day from Madrid 
and spend it in Avila. But we never came, and Avila 
remains a vision of walls and roofs and towers tawny 
gray glimpsed in a rift of the storm that again swept 
toward the Spanish capital. 



ii 



We were very glad indeed to get to Madrid, though 
dismayed by apprehensions of the octroi which we felt 
sure awaited us. We recalled the behavior of the ami- 
able officer of Valladolid who bumped our baggage 
about on the roof of our omnibus, and we thought that 
in Madrid such an officer could not do less than shatter 
our boxes and scatter their contents in the streaming 
street. What was then our surprise, our joy, to find 
that in Madrid there was no octroi at all, and that the 
amiable mozos who took our things hardly knew what 
we meant when we asked for it. At Madrid they 
scarcely wanted our tickets at the gate of the station, 
and we found ourselves in the soft embrace of mod- 
ernity, so dear after the feudal rigors of Old Castile, 
when we mounted into a motor-bus and sped away 
through the spectacular town, so like Paris, so like 
Rome as to have no personality of its own except in 
this similarity, and never stopped till the liveried 
service swarmed upon us at the door of the Hotel Ilitz. 

Here the modernity which had so winningly greeted 

us at the station welcomed us more and consolinglv. 

84 



PHASES OF MADRID 

There was not only steam-heating, but the steam was 
on ! It wanted but a turn of the hand at the radiators, 
and the rooms were warm. The rooms themselves re- 
sponded to our appeal and looked down into a silent 
inner court, deaf to the clatter of the streets, and sleep 
haunted the very air, distracted, if at all, by the instant 
facility and luxury of the appliances. Was it really 
in Spain that a metallic tablet at the bed-head invited 
the wanderer to call with one button for the earner ero, 
another for the camerera, and another for the mozo, 
who would all instantly come speaking English like 
so many angels ? Were we to have these beautiful 
chambers for a humble two dollars and forty cents a 
day; and if it was true, why did we ever leave them 
and try for something ever so much worse and so very 
little cheaper ? Let me be frank with the reader whom 
I desire for my friend, and own that we were frightened 
from the Ritz Hotel by the rumor of Ritz prices. I 
paid my bill there, which was imagined with scrupu- 
lous fullness to the last possible centimo, and so I may 
disinterestedly declare that the Ritz is the only hotel 
in Madrid where you get the worth of your money, 
even when the money seems more but scarcely is so. 
In all Spain I know of only two other hotels which 
may compare with it, and these are the English hotels, 
one at Honda and one at Algeciras. If I add falter- 
ingly the hotel where we stayed a night in Toledo 
and the hotel where we abode a fortnight in Seville, 
I heap the measure of merit and press it down. 

We did not begin at once our insensate search for 
another hotel in Madrid; but the sky had cleared and 
we went out into the strange capital so uncharacter- 
istically characteristic, to find tea at a certain cafe we 
had heard of. It was in the Calle de Alcala (a name 

which so richly stimulates the imagination), and it 

85 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

looked out across this handsome street, to a club that I 
never knew the name of, where at a series of open 
windows was a flare of young men in silk hats leaning 
out on their elbows and letting no passing fact of the 
avenue escape them. It was worth their study, and if 
I had been an idle young Spaniard, or an idle old one, 
I would have asked nothing better than to spend my 
Sunday afternoon poring from one of those windows 
on my well-known world of Madrid as it babbled by. 
Even in my quality of alien, newly arrived and igno- 
rant of that world, I already felt its fascination. 

\ Sunday in Spain is perhaps different from other days 
of the week to the Spanish sense, but to the traveler 
it is too like them to be distinguishable except in that 
guilty Sabbath consciousness which is probably an effect 
from original sin in every Protestant soul. The casual 
eye could not see but that in Madrid every one seemed 
as much or as little at work as on any other day. My 
own casual eye noted that the most picturesquely evi- 
dent thing in the city was the country life which seemed 
so to pervade it. In the Calle de Alcala, flowing to 
the Prado out of the Puerta del Sol, there passed a 
current of farm-carts and farm-wagons more con- 
spicuous than any urban vehicles, as they jingled by, 
with men and women on their sleigh-belled donkeys, 
astride or atop the heavily laden panniers. The donkeys 
bore a part literally leading in all the rustic equipages, 
and with their superior intellect found a way through 
the crowds for the string-teams of the three or four 
large mules that followed them in harness. Whenever 
we saw a team of mules without this sage guidance 
we trembled for their safety; as for horses, no team 
of them attempted the difficult passage, though ox-trains 
seemed able to dispense with the path-finding donkeys. 

^To be sure, the horses abounded in the cabs, which 

86 



PHASES OF MADRID 

were mostly bad, more or less. It is an idiosyncrasy of 
the cabs in Madrid that only the open victorias have 
rubber tires ; if you go in a coupe you must consent to be 
ruthlessly bounced over the rough pavements on wheels 
unsoftened. It " follows as the night the day " that 
the coupe is not in favor, and that in its conservative 
disuse it accumulates a smell not to be acquired out 
of Spain. One such vehicle I had which I thought 
must have been stabled in the house of Cervantes at 
Valladolid, and rushed on the Sud-Express for my 
service at Madrid ; the stench in it was such that after 
a short drive to the house of a friend I was fain to 
dismiss it at a serious loss in pesetas and take the risk 
of another which might have been as bad. Fortunately 
a kind lady intervened with a private carriage and a 
coachman shaved that very day, whereas my poor old 
cabman, who was of one and the same smell as his cab, 
had not been shaved for three days. 



in 



This seems the place to note the fact that no Span- 
iard in humble life shaves often er than once in three 
days, and that you aWays see him on the third day 
just before he has shaved. But all this time I have 
left myself sitting in the cafe looking out on the club 
that looks out on the Calle do Alcala, and keeping the 
waiter waiting with a jug of hot milk in his hand 
while I convince him (such a friendly, smiling man 
he is, and glad of my instruction!) that in tea one al- 
ways wants the milk cold. To him that does not seem 
reasonable, since one wants it hot in coffee and choco- 
late; but he yields to my prejudice, and after that he 

alwavs says, " Ah, leclie fria!" and we smile radiantly 

87 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

together in the bond of comradery which cold milk es- 
tablishes between man and man in Spain. As yet tea 
is a novelty in that country, though the young English 
queen, universally loved and honored, has made it the 
fashion in high life. Still it is hard to overcome 
such a prepossession as that of hot milk in tea, 
and in some places you cannot get it cold for love or 
money. 

I But again I leave myself waiting in that cafe, where 
slowly, and at last not very overwhelmingly in num- 
ber, the beautiful plaster-pale Spanish ladies gather 
with their husbands and have chocolate. It is a riot- 
ous dissipation for them, though it does not sound so; 
the home is the Spanish ideal of the woman's place, 
as it is of our anti-suffragists, though there is nothing 
corresponding to our fireside in it; and the cafe is her 
husband's place without her. When she walks in the 
street, where mostly she drives, she walks with her eyes 
straight before her; to look either to the right or left, 
especially if a man is on either hand, is a superfluity 
of naughtiness. The habit of looking straight ahead 
is formed in youth, and it continues through life; so 
at least it is said, and if I cannot affirm it I will not 
deny it. The beautiful black eyes so discreetly directed 
looked as often from mantillas as hats, even in Madrid, 
which is the capital, and much infested by French 
fashions. You must not believe it when any one tells 
you that the mantilla is going out; it prevails every- 
where, and it increases from north to south, and in 
Seville it is almost universal. Hats are worn there only 
in driving, but at Madrid there were many hats worn 
in walking, though whether by Spanish women or by 
foreigners, of course one could not, though a wayfaring 
man and an American, stop them to ask. 

There are more women in the street at Madrid than 

88 



PHASES OF MADRID 

in the provincial cities, perhaps because it is the capital 
and cosmopolitan, and perhaps because the streets are 
many of them open and pleasant, though there are 
enough of them dark and narrow, too. I do not know 
just why the Puerta del Sol seems so much ampler and 
gayer than the Calle de Alcala; it is not really wider, 
but it seems more to concentrate the coming and going, 
and with its high-hoteled opposition of corners is of a 
supreme speetacularity. Besides, the name is so fine: 
what better could any city place ask than to be called 
Gate of the Sun % Perpetual trams wheeze and whistle 
through it ; large shops face upon it ; the sidewalks are 
thronged with passers, and the many little streets de- 
bouching on it pour their streams of traffic and travel 
into it on the right and left. It is mainly fed by the 
avenues leaving the royal palace on the west, and its 
eddying tide empties through the Calle de Alcala 
into the groves and gardens of the Prado whence it 
spreads over all the drives and parks east and north 
and south. 

For a capital purposed and planned Madrid is very 
well indeed. It has not the symmetry which fore- 
thought gave the topography of Washington, or the 
beauty which afterthought has given Paris. But it 
makes you think a little of Washington, and a great 
deal of Paris, though a great deal more yet of Rome. 
It is Renaissance so far as architecture goes, and it is 
very modern Latin; so that it is of the older and the 
newer Rome that it makes you think. From time to 
time it seemed to me I must be in Rome, and I re- 
covered myself with a pang to find I was not. Yet, as 
I say, Madrid was very well indeed, and when I re- 
flected I had to own that I had come there on purpose 
to be there, and not to be in Rome, where also I should 

have been so satisfied to be. 

89 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 



IV 



\I do not know but we chose our hotel when we left 
the Ritz because it was so Italian, so Roman. It had 
a wide grape arbor before it, with a generous spread 
of trellised roof through which dangled the grape 
bunches among the leaves of the vine. Around this 
arbor at top went a balustrade of marble, with fat 
putti, or marble boys, on the corners, who would have 
watched over the fruit if they had not been preoccupied 
with looking like so many thousands of puiii in Italy. 
They looked like Italian putti with a difference, the 
difference that passes between all the Spanish things 
and the Italian things they resemble. They were 
coarser and grosser in figure, and though amiable 
enough in aspect, they lacked the refinement, the air 
of pretty appeal which Italian art learns from nature 
to give the faces of putti. Yet they were charming, 
and it was always a pleasure to look at them posing 
in pairs at the corners of the balustrade, and I do not 
know but dozing in the hours of siesta. If they had 
been in wood Spanish art would have known how to 
make them better, but in stone they had been gather- 
ing an acceptable weather stain during the human gen- 
erations they had been there, and their plump stomachs 
were weather-beaten white. 

s ^ I do not know if they had been there long enough to 
have witnessed the murder of Cromwell's ambassador 
done in our street by two Jacobite gentlemen who could 
not abide his coming to honor in the land where they 
were in exile from England. That must have been 
sometime about the middle of the century after Philip 
II., bigot as he was, could not bear the more masterful 
bigotry of the archbishop of Toledo, and brought his 

90 



PHASES OF MADRID 

court from that ancient capital, and declared Madrid 
henceforward the capital forever; which did not pre- 
vent Philip III. from taking his court to Valladolid 
and making that the capital en tit re when he liked. 
However, some other Philip or Charles, or whoever, re- 
turned with his court to Madrid and it has ever since 
remained the capital, and has come, with many natural 
disadvantages, to look its supremacy. For my pleasure 
I would rather live in Seville, but that would be a 
luxurious indulgence of the love of beauty, and like a 
preference of Venice in Italy when there was Rome 
to live in. Madrid is not Rome, but it makes you 
think of Rome as I have said, and if it had a better 
climate it would make you think of Rome still more. 
Notoriously, however, it has not a good climate and 
we had not come at the right season to get the best of 
the bad. The bad season itself was perverse, for the 
rains do not usually begin in their bitterness at Madrid 
before November, and now they began early in October. 
The day would open fair, with only a few little white 
clouds in the large blue, and if we could trust other's 
experience we knew it would rain before the day closed ; 
only a morning absolutely clear could warrant the hope 
of a day fair till sunset. Shortly after noon the little 
white clouds would drift together and be joined by 
others till they hid the large blue, and then the drops 
would begin to fall. Ry that time the air would have 
turned raw and chill, and the rain would be of a cold 
which it kept through the night. 

v This habit of raining every afternoon was what kept 
us from seeing rank, riches, and beauty in the Paseo de 
la Castellana, where they drive only on fine afternoons ; 
they now remained at home even more persistently than 
we did* for with that love of the fashionable world 
for which I am always blaming myself I sometimes 
7 »1 



FAMILIAE SPANISH TRAVELS 

took a cab and fared desperately forth in pursuit of 
them. Only once did I seem to catch a glimpse of 
them, and that once I saw a closed carriage weltering 
along the drive between the trees and the trams that 
border it, with the coachman and footman snugly 
sheltered under umbrellas on the box. This was some- 
thing, though not a great deal; I could not make out 
the people inside the carriage; yet it helped to certify 
to me the fact that the great world does drive in the 
Paseo de la Castellana and does not drive in the Paseo 
del Prado ; that is quite abandoned, even on the wettest 
days, to the very poor and perhaps unfashionable people. 



\ It may have been our comparative defeat with fash- 
ion in its most distinctive moments of pleasuring (for 
one thing I wished to see how the dreariness of Madrid 
gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare 
with that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made 
us the more determined to see a bull-fight in the Span- 
ish capital. We had vowed ourselves in coming to 
Spain to set the Spaniards an example of civilization 
by inflexibly refusing to see a bull-fight under any 
circumstances or for any consideration; but it seemed 
to us that it was a sort of public duty to go and see 
the crowd, what it was like, in the time and place where 
the Spanish crowd is most like itself. We would go 
and remain in our places till everybody else was placed, 
and then, when the picadors and banderilleros and 
matadors were all ranged in the arena, and the gate 
was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we 
would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go 

inexorably away. This union of self-indulgence and 

92 



PHASES OF MADRID 

self-denial seemed almost an act of piety when we 
learned that the bull-iight was to be on Sunday, and 
we prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the 
week. On Saturday afternoon it rained, of course, but 
the worst was that it rained on Sunday morning, and 
the clouds did not lift till noon. Then the glowing 
concierge of our hotel, a man so gaily hopeful, so ex- 
pansively promising that I could hardly believe he was 
not an Italian, said that there could not possibly be a 
bull-fight that day ; the rain would have made the arena 
so slippery that man, horse, and bull would all fall 
down together in a common ruin, with no hope whatever 
of hurting one another. 

We gave up this bull-fight at once, but we were the 
more resolved to see a bull-fight because we still owed 
it to the Spanish people to come away before we had 
time to look at it, and we said we would certainly go 
at Cordova where we should spend the next Sabbath. 
At Cordova we learned that it was the closed season 
for bull-fighting, but vague hopes of usefulness to the 
Spanish public were held out to us at Seville, the very 
metropolis of bull-fighting, where the bulls came bellow- 
ing up from their native fields athirst for the blood of 
the profession and the aficionados, who outnumber there 
the amateurs of the whole rest of Spain. But at Seville 
we were told that there would be no more bull-feasts, 
as the Spaniards much more preferably call the bull- 
fights, till April, and now we were only in October. 
We said, Never mind; we would go to a bull-feast in 
Granada; but at Granada the season was even more 
hopelessly closed. In Ronda itself, which is the heart, 
as Seville is the home of the bull-feast, we could only 
see the inside of the empty arena ; and at Algeciras the 
outside alone offered itself to our vision. By this time 
the sense of duty was so strong upon us that if there 

93 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

had been a bull-feast we would have shared in it and 
stayed through till the last espada dropped dead, gored 
through, at the knees of the last bull transfixed by his 
unerring sword; and the other toreros, the banderil- 
leros with their darts and the picadors with their dis- 
emboweled horses, lay scattered over the blood-stained 
arena. Such is the force of a high resolve in strangers 
bent upon a lesson of civilization to a barbarous people 
when disappointed of their purpose. But we learned 
too late that only in Madrid is there any bull-feasting 
in the winter. In the provincial cities the bulls are 
dispirited by the cold ; but in the capital, for the honor 
of the nation, they somehow pull themselves together 
and do their poor best to kill and be killed. Yet in the 
capital where the zeal of the bulls, and I suppose, of 
the bull-fighters, is such, it is said that there is a subtle 
decay in the fashionable, if not popular, esteem of the 
only sport which remembers in the modern world the 
gladiatorial shows of imperial Rome. It is said, but 
I do not know whether it is true, that the young Eng- 
lish queen who has gladly renounced her nation and 
religion for the people who seem so to love her, cannot 
endure the bloody sights of the bull-feast ; and when it 
comes to the horses dragging their entrails across the 
ring, or the espada despatching the bull, or the bull toss- 
ing a banderillero in the air she puts up her fan. It 
is said also that the young Spanish king, who has shown 
himself such a merciful-minded youth, and seems so 
eager to make the best of the bad business of being a 
king at all, sympathizes with her, and shows an obvious- 
ly abated interest at these supreme moments. 

\I do not know whether or not it was because we Had 
failed with the bull-feast that we failed to go to any 
sort of public entertainment in Madrid. Tt certainly 

was in my book to go to the theater, and see some of 

94 



PHASES OF MADRID 

those modern plays which I had read so many of, and 
which I had translated one of for Lawrence Barrett 
in the far-off days before the flood of native American 
dramas now deluging our theater. That play was " Un 
Drama Eueva," by Estebanez, which between us we 
called " Yorick's Love " and w T hich my very knightly 
tragedian made his battle-horse during the latter years 
of his life. In another version Barrett had seen it 
fail in New York, but its failure left him with the 
lasting desire to do it himself. A Spanish friend, now 
dead but then the gifted and eccentric Consul General 
at Quebec, got me a copy of the play from Madrid, 
and I thought there was great reason in a suggestion 
from another friend that it had failed because it put 
Shakespeare on the stage as one of its characters; but 
it seemed to me that the trouble could be got over by 
making the poet Heywood represent the Shakespearian 
epoch. I did this and the sole obstacle to its success 
seemed removed. It went, as the enthusiastic Barrett 
used to say, " with a shout," though to please him I 
had hurt it all I could by some additions and adapta- 
tions; and though it was a most ridiculously romantic 
story of the tragical loves of Yorick (whom the Latins 
like to go on imagining out of Hamlet a much more 
interesting and important character than Shakespeare 
ever meant him to be fancied), and ought to have re- 
mained the fiasco it began, still it gained Barrett much 
money and me some little. 

I was always proud of this success, and I boasted 
of it to the bookseller in Madrid, whom I interested in 
finding me some still moderner plays after quite failing 
to interest another bookseller. Your Spanish merchant 
seems seldom concerned in a mercantile transaction; 
but perhaps it was not so strange in the case of this 

Spanish bookseller because he was a German and spoke 

95 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

a surprising English in response to my demand whether 
he spoke any. He was the frowsiest bookseller I ever 
saw, and he was in the third day of his unshavenness 
with a shirt-front and coat-collar plentifully bedan- 
druffed from his shaggy hair; but he entered into the 
spirit of my affair and said if that Spanish play had 
succeeded so wonderfully, then I ought to pay fifty 
per cent, more than the current price for the other 
Spanish plays which I wanted him to get me. I laughed 
with him at the joke which I found simple earnest 
when our glowing concierge gave me the books next 
day, and I perceived that the proposed supplement had 
really been paid for them on my account. I should 
not now be grieving for this incident if the plays had 
proved better reading than they did on experiment. 
Some of them were from the Catalan, and all of them 
dealt with the simpler actual life of Spain; but they 
did not deal impressively with it, though they seemed 
to me more hopeful in conception than certain psycho- 
logical plays of ten or fifteen years ago, which the 
Spanish authors had too clearly studied from Ibsen. 

They might have had their effect in the theater, but 
the rainy weather had not only spoiled my sole chance 
of the bull-feast ; the effect of it in a stubborn cold for- 
bade me the night air and kept me from testing any of 
the new dramas on the stage, which is always giving 
new dramas in Madrid. The stage, or rather the the- 
ater, is said to be truly a passion with the Madrilenos, 
who go every night to see the whole or the part of a 
play and do not mind seeing the same play constantly, 
as if it were opera. They may not care to see the play 
so much as to be seen at it ; that happens in every coun- 
try; but no doubt the plays have a charm which did 
not impart itself from the printed page. The companies 

are reported very good; but the reader must take this 

96 



PHASES OF MADRID 

from me at second hand, as he must take the general 
society fact. I only know that people ask you to dinner 
at nine, and if they go to the theater afterward they 
cannot well come away till toward one o'clock. It is 
after this hour that the tertulia, that peculiarly Span- 
ish function, begins, but how long it lasts or just what 
it is I do not know. I am able to report confidently, 
however, that it is a species of salon and that it is said 
to be called a tertulia because of the former habit in 
the guests, and no doubt the hostess, of quoting the 
poet Tertullian. It is of various constituents, accord- 
ing as it is a fashionable, a literary, or an artistic 
tertulia, or all three with an infusion of science. Often- 
est, I believe, it is a domestic affair and all degrees 
of cousinship resort to it with brothers and sisters and 
uncles, who meet with the pleasant Latin liking of 
frequent meetings among kindred. In some cases no 
doubt it is a brilliant reunion where lively things are 
said; in others it may be dull; in far the most cases 
it seems to be held late at night or early in the morning. 



VI 



It was hard, after being shut up several days, that 
one must not go out after nightfall, and if one went out 
by day, one must go with closed lips and avoid all talk- 
ing in the street under penalty of incurring the dreaded 
pneumonia of Madrid. Except for that dreaded pneu- 
monia, I believe the air of Madrid is not so pestilential 
as it has been reported. Public opinion is beginning 
to veer in favor of it, just as the criticism which has 
pronounced Madrid commonplace and unpicturesque 
because it is not obviously old, is now finding a charm 

in it peculiar to the place. Its very modernity em- 

97 



FAMILIAE SPANISH TKAVELS 

bodies and imparts the charm, which will grow as the 
city grows in wideness and straightness. It is in the 
newer quarter that it recalls Rome or the newer quar- 
ters of Rome ; but there is an old part of it that recalls 
the older part of Naples, though the streets are not 
quite so narrow nor the houses so high. There is like 
bargaining at the open stands with the buyers and 
sellers chaffering over them; there is a likeness in the 
people's looks, too, but when it comes to the most char- 
acteristic thing of Naples, Madrid is not in it for a 
moment. I mean the bursts of song which all day long 
and all night long you hear in Naples ; and this seems 
as good a place as any to say that to my experience 
Spain is a songless land. We had read much of the 
song and dance there, but though the dance might be 
hired the song was never offered for love or money. 
To be sure, in Toledo, once, a woman came to her door 
across the way under our hotel window and sang over 
the slops she emptied into the street, but then she shut 
the door and we heard her no more. In Cordova there 
was as brief a peal of music from a house which we 
passed, and in Algeciras we heard one short sweet 
strain from a girl whom we could not see behind her 
lattice. Besides these chance notes we heard no other 
by any chance. But this is by no means saying that 
there is not abundant song in Spain, only it was kept 
quiet ; I suppose that if we had been there in the spring 
instead of the fall we should at least have heard the 
birds singing. In Madrid there were not even many 
street cries ; a few in the Puerta del Sol, yes ; but the 
peasants who drove their mule-teams through the streets 
scarcely lifted their voices in reproach or invitation; 
they could trust the wise donkeys that led them to get 
them safely through the difficult places. There was 

no audible quarreling among the cabmen, and when 

98 



PHASES OF MADRID 

you called a cab it was useless to cry " Heigh !" or 
shake your umbrella ; you made play with your thumb 
and finger in the air and sibilantly whispered; other- 
wise the cabman ignored you and went on reading his 
newspaper. The cabmen of Madrid are great readers, 
much greater, I am sorry to say, than I was, for when- 
ever I bought a Spanish paper I found it extremely 
well written. Kow and then I expressed my political 
preferences in buying El Liberal which I thought very 
able; even El Imparcial I thought able, though it is 
less radical than El Liberal, sl paper which is published 
simultaneously in Madrid, with local editions in several 
provincial cities. 

\ For all the street silence there seemed to be a great 
deal of noise, which I suppose came from the click of 
boots on the sidewalks and of hoofs in roadways and 
the grind and squeal of the trams, with the harsh smit- 
ing of the unrubbered tires of the closed cabs on the 
rough granite blocks of the streets. But there are 
asphalted streets in Madrid where the sound of the 
hoofs and wheels is subdued, and the streets rough and 
smooth are kept of a cleanliness which would put the 
streets of ISTew York to shame if anything could. Ordi- 
narily you could get cabs anywhere, but if you wanted 
one very badly, when remote from a stand, there was 
more than one chance that a cab marked Libre would 
pass you with lordly indifference. As for motor taxi- 
cabs there are none in the city, and at Cook's they 
would not take the responsibility of recommending any 
automobiles for country excursions. 



VTT 

T linger over these sordid details because I must 
needs shrink before the mention of that incomparable 

99 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

gallery, the Museo del Prado. I am careful not to call 
it the greatest gallery in the world, for I think of what 
the Louvre, the Pitti, and the National Gallery are, 
and what our own Metropolitan is going to be; but 
surely the Museo del Prado is incomparable for its 
peculiar riches. It is part of the autobiographical asso- 
ciations with my Spanish travel that when John Hay, 
who was not yet, by thirty or forty years, the great 
statesman he became, but only the breeziest of young 
Secretaries of Legation, just two weeks from his post in 
Madrid, blew surprisingly into my little carpenter's 
box in Cambridge one day, he boasted almost the 
first thing that the best Titians in the world were in 
the Prado galleries. I was too lately from Venice in 
1867 not to have my inward question whether there 
could be anywhere a better Titian than the " Assump- 
tion," but I loved Hay too much to deny him openly. 
I said that I had no doubt of it, and when the other 
day I went to the Prado it was with the wish of finding 
him perfectly right, triumphantly right. I had been 
from the first a strong partisan of Titian, and in many 
a heated argument with Ruskin, unaware of our con- 
troversy, I had it out with that most prejudiced par- 
tisan of Tintoretto. I always got the better of him, 
as one does in such dramatizations, where one frames 
one's opponent's feeble replies for him ; but now in the 
Prado, sadly and strangely enough, I began to wonder 
if Ruskin might not have tacitly had the better of me 
all the time. If Hay was right in holding that the best 
Titians in the world were in the Prado, then I was 
wrong in having argued for Titian against Tintoretto 
with Ruskin. I could only wish that I had the " As- 
sumption " there, or some of those senators whose por- 
traits I remembered in the Academy at Venice. The 

truth is that to my eye he seemed to weaken before 

100 



PHASES OF MADRID 

the Spanish masters, though I say this, who must con- 
fess that I failed to see the room of his great portraits. 
The Italians who hold their own with the Spaniards 
are Tintoretto and Veronese; even Murillo was more 
than a match for Titian in such pictures of his as I 
saw (I must own that I did not see the best, or nearly 
all), though properly speaking Murillo is to be known 
at his greatest only in Seville. 

\But Velasquez, but Velasquez ! In the Prado there 
is no one else present when he is by, with his Philips 
and Charleses, and their " villainous hanging of the 
nether lip," with his hideous court dwarfs and his 
pretty princes and princesses, his grandees and jesters, 
his allegories and battles, his pastorals and chases, 
which fitly have a vast salon to themselves, not only 
that the spectator may realize at once the rich variety 
and abundance of the master, but that such lesser lights 
as Rubens, Titian, Correggio, Giorgione, Tintoretto, 
Veronese, Rembrandt, Zurbaran, El Greco, Murillo, 
may not be needlessly dimmed by his surpassing splen- 
dor. I leave to those who know painting from the 
painter's art to appreciate the technical perfection of 
Velasquez ; I take my stand outside of that, and acclaim 
its supremacy in virtue of that reality which all Span- 
ish art has seemed always to strive for and which in 
Velasquez it incomparably attains. This is the literary 
quality which the most untechnical may feel, and which 
is not clearer to the connoisseur than to the least un- 
learned. 

After Velasquez in the Prado we wanted Goya, and 
more and more Goya, who is as Spanish and as unlike 
Velasquez as can very well be. There was not enough 
Goya abovestairs to satisfy us, but in the Goya room 
in the basement there was a series of scenes from Span- 
ish life, mostly frolic campestral things, which he did 

101 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

as patterns for tapestries and which came near being 
enough in their way: the way of that reality which is 
so far from the reality of Velasquez. There, striving 
with their strangeness, we found a young American 
husband and wife who said they were going to Egypt, 
and seemed so anxious to get out of Spain that they 
all but asked us which turning to take. They had a 
Baedeker of 1901. which they had been deceived in at 
New York as the latest edition, and they were appar- 
ently making nothing of the Goyas and were as if lost 
down there in the basement. They were in doubt about 
going further in a country which had inveigled them 
from Gibraltar as far as its capital. They advised 
with us about Burgos, of all places, and when we said 
the hotels in Burgos were very cold, they answered, 
Well they had thought so; and the husband asked, 
Spain was a pretty good place to cut out, wasn't it ? 
The wife expected that they would find some one in 
Egypt who spoke English ; she had expected they would 
speak Erench in Spain, but had been disappointed. 
They had left their warm things at Gibraltar and were 
almost frozen already. They were as good and sweet 
and nice as they could be, and we were truly sorry to 
part with them and leave them to what seemed to be a 
mistake which they were not to blame for. 

I wish that all Europeans and all Europeanized 
Americans knew how to value such incorruptible con- 
nationals, who would, I was sure, carry into the deepest 
dark of Egypt and over the whole earth undimmed the 
light of our American single-heartedness. I would 
have given something to know from just which kind 
country town and companionable commonwealth of our 
Union they had come, but I would not have given much, 
for I knew that they could have come from almost 
any. In their modest satisfaction with our own order 

102 



PHASES OF MADRID 

of things, our language, our climate, our weather, they 
would not rashly condemn those of other lands, but 
would give them a fair chance ; and, if when they got 
home again, they would have to report unfavorably of 
the Old World to the Board of Trade or the Woman's 
Club, it would not be without intelligent reservations, 
even generous reservations. They would know much 
more than they knew before they came abroad, and if 
they had not seen Europe distinctly, but in a glass 
darkly, still they would have seen it and would be the 
wiser and none the worse for it. They would still be 
of their shrewd, pure American ideals, and would judge 
their recollections as they judged their experiences by 
them ; and I wish we were all as confirmed in our fealty 
to those ideals. 

They were not, clearly enough, of that yet older 
fashion of Americans who used to go through European 
galleries buying copies of the masterpieces which the 
local painters were everywhere making. With this pair 
the various postal-card reproductions must have long 
superseded the desire or the knowledge of copies, and 
I doubt if many Americans of any sort now support 
that honored tradition. Who, then, does support it ? 
The galleries of the Prado seem as full of copyists as 
they could have been fifty years ago, and many of 
them were making very good copies. I wish I could 
say they were working as diligently as copyists used 
to work, but copyists are now subject to frequent inter- 
ruptions, not from the tourists but from one another. 
They used to be all men, mostly grown gray in their 
pursuit, but now they are both men and women, and 
younger and the women are sometimes very pretty. In 
the Prado one saw several pairs of such youth con- 
versing together, forgetful of everything around them, 

and on terms so very like flirtatious that they could 

103 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TKAVELS 

not well be distinguished from them. They were terms 
that other Spanish girls could enjoy only with a wooden 
lattice and an iron grille between them and the novios 
outside their windows ; and no tourist of the least heart 
could help rejoicing with them. In the case of one 
who stood with her little figure slanted and her little 
head tilted, looking up into the charmed eyes of a 
tall rubio, the tourist could not help rejoicing with 
the young man too. 

The day after our day in the Prado we found our- 
selves in the Museum of Modern Art through the kind 
offices of our mistaken cabman when we were looking 
for the Archaeological Museum. But we were not 
sorry, for some of the new or newer pictures and sculp- 
tures were well worth seeing, though we should never 
have tried for them. The force of the masters which 
the ideals of the past held in restraint here raged in 
unbridled excess ; but if I like that force so much, why 
do I say excess ? The new or newer Spanish art likes an 
immense canvas, say as large as the side of a barn, and 
it chooses mostly a tragical Spanish history in which 
it riots with a young sense of power brave to see. There 
were a dozen of those mighty dramas which I would 
have liked to bring away with me if I had only had a 
town hall big enough to put them into after I got 
them home. There were sculptures as masterful and 
as mighty as the pictures, but among the paintings 
there was one that seemed to subdue all the infuriate 
actions to the calm of its awful repose. This was 
Gisbert's " Execution of Torrejos and his Companions," 
who were shot at Malaga in 1830 for a rising in favor 
of constitutional government. One does not, if one is 
as wise as I, attempt to depict pictures, and I leave 
this most heroic, most pathetic, most heart-breaking, 

most consoling masterpiece for my reader to go and 

104 



PHASES OF MADRID 

see for himself; it is almost worth going as far as 
Madrid to see. Never in any picture do I remember the 
like of those sad, brave, severe faces of the men stand- 
ing up there to be shot, where already their friends lay 
dead at their feet. A tumbled top-hat in the foreground 
had an effect awfuller than a tumbled head would have 
had. 



VIII 



Besides this and those other histories there were 
energetic portraits and vigorous landscapes in the Mod- 
ern Museum, where if we had not been bent so on 
visiting the Archaeological Museum, we would willing- 
ly have spent the whole morning. But we were deter- 
mined to see the Peruvian and Mexican antiquities 
which we believed must be treasured up in it ; and that 
we might not fail of finding it, I gave one of the cus- 
todians a special peseta to take us out on the balcony 
and show us exactly how to get to it. He was so precise 
and so full in his directions that we spent the next 
half-hour in wandering fatuously round the whole re- 
gion before we stumbled, almost violently, upon it im- 
mediately back of the Modern Museum. Will it be 
credited that it was then hardly worth seeing for the 
things we meant to see? The Peruvian and Mexican 
antiquities were so disappointing that we would hardly 
look at the Etruscan, Greek, and Roman things which 
it was so much richer in. To be sure, we had seen and 
overseen the like of these long before in Italy ; but they 
were admirably arranged in this museum, so that with- 
out the eager help of the custodians (which two cents 
would buy at any turn) we could have found pleasure 
in them, whereas the Aztec antiquities were mostly 
copies in plaster and the Inca jewelry not striking. 

105 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

Before finding the place we had had the help of two 
policemen and one newsboy and a postman in losing 
ourselves in the Prado where we mostly sought for 
it, and with difficulty kept ourselves from being thrust 
into the gallery there. In Spain a man, or even a 
boy, does not like to say he does not know where a 
place is; he is either too proud or too polite to do it, 
and he will misdirect you without mercy. But the 
morning was bright, and almost warm, and we should 
have looked forward to weeks of sunny weather if our 
experience had not taught us that it would rain in the 
afternoon, and if greater experience than ours had not 
instructed us that there would be many days of thick 
fog now before the climate of Madrid settled itself to 
the usual brightness of February. We had time to 
note again in the Paseo Castellana, which is the fash- 
ionable drive, that it consists of four rows of acacias 
and tamarisks and a stretch of lawn, with seats be- 
side it ; the rest is bare grasslessness, with a bridle-path 
on one side and a tram-line on the other. If it had 
been late afternoon the Paseo would have been filled 
with the gay world, but being the late forenoon we 
had to leave it well-nigh unpeopled and go back to our 
hotel, where the excellent midday breakfast merited the 
best appetite one could bring to it. 

In fact, all the meals of our hotel were good, and 
of course they were only too superabundant. They 
were pretty much what they were everywhere in Spain, 
and they were better everywhere than they were in 
Granada where we paid most for them. They were 
appetizing, and not of the cooking which the popular 
superstition attributes to Spain, where the hotel cook- 
ing is not rank with garlic or fiery with pepper, as 
the untraveled believe. At luncheon in our Madrid 

hotel we had a liberal choice of eggs in any form, the 

106 



PHASES OF MADRID 

delicious arroz a la Valencia, a kind of risotto, with 
saffron to savor and color it; veal cutlets or beefsteak, 
salad, cheese, grapes, pears, and peaches, and often 
melon; the ever-admirable melon of Spain, which I 
had learned to like in England. At dinner there were 
soup, fish, entree, roast beef, lamb, or poultry, vege- 
tables, salad, sweet, cheese, and fruit; and there was 
pretty poor wine ad libitum at both meals. For break- 
fast there was good and true (or true enough) coffee 
with rich milk, which if we sometimes doubted it to 
be goat's milk we were none the worse if none the wiser 
for, as at dinner we were not either if we unwittingly 
ate kid for lamb. 

v There were not many people in the hotel, but the 
dining-room was filled by citizens who came in with 
the air of frequenters. They were not people of fash- 
ion, as we readily perceived, but kindly-looking mer- 
cantile folk, and ladies painted as white as newly cal- 
cimined house walls; and all gravely polite. There 
was one gentleman as large round as a hogshead, with 
a triple arrangement of fat at the back of his neck 
which was fascinating. He always bowed when we 
met (necessarily with his whole back) and he ate with 
an appetite proportioned to his girth. I could wish 
still to know who and what he was, for he was a person 
very much to my mind. So was the head waiter, dark, 
silent, clean-shaven, who let me use my deplorable 
Spanish with him, till in the last days he came out 
with some very fair English which he had been courte- 
ously concealing from me. He looked own brother 
to the room-waiter in our corridor, whose companion- 
ship I could desire always to have. One could not be 
so confident of the sincerity of the little camarera who 
slipped out of the room with a soft, sidelong " De 
nada " at one's thanks for the hot water in the morn- 
8 107 



PAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

ing; but one could stake one's life on the goodness of 
this camarero. He was not so tall as his leanness made 
him look; he was of a national darkness of eyes and 
hair which as imparted to his tertian clean-shavenness 
was a deep blue. He spoke, with a certain hesitation, 
a beautiful Castilian, delicately lisping the sibilants 
and strongly throating the gutturals ; and what he said 
you could believe. He never was out of the way when 
wanted; he darkled with your boots and shoes in a 
little closet next your door, and came from it with the 
morning coffee and rolls. In a stress of frequentation 
he appeared in evening dress in the dining-room at 
night, and did honor to the place; but otherwise he 
was to be seen only in our corridor, or in the cold, dark 
chamber at the stair head where the camareras sat sew- 
ing, kept in check by his decorum. Without being 
explicitly advised of the fact, I am sure he was the 
best of Catholics, and that he would have burnt me 
for a heretic if necessary; but he would have done it 
from his conscience and for my soul's good after I had 
recanted. He seldom smiled, but when he did you 
could see it was from his heart. 

His contrast, his very antithesis, the joyous con- 
cierge, was always smiling, and was every way more 
like an Italian than a Spaniard. He followed us into 
the wettest Madrid weather with the sunny rays of his 
temperament, and welcomed our returning cab with 
an effulgence that performed the effect of an umbrella 
in the longish walk from the curbstone to the hotel 
door, past the grape arbor whose fruit ripened for us 
only in a single bunch, though he had so confidently 
prophesied our daily pleasure in it. He seemed at first 
to be the landlord, and without reference to higher 
authority he gave us beautiful rooms overlooking the 

bacchanal vine which would have been filled with sun- 

108 



PHASES OF MADRID 

shine if the weather had permitted. When he lapsed 
into the concierge, he got us, for five pesetas, so deep 
and wide a wood-box, covered with crimson cloth, that 
he was borne out by the fact in declaring that the 
wood in it would last us as long as we stayed; it was 
oak wood, hard as iron, and with the bellows that ac- 
companied it we blew the last billet of it into a solid 
coal by which we drank our last coffee in that hotel. 
His spirit, his genial hopefulness, reconciled us to the 
infirmities of the house during the period of transition 
beginning for it and covering our stay. It was to be 
rebuilt on a scale out-Bitzing the Ritz ; but in the mean 
while it was not quite the Ritz. There was a time 
when the elevator-shaft seemed to have tapped the 
awful sources of the smell in the house of Cervantes at 
Valladolid, but I do not remember what blameless 
origin the concierge assigned to the odor, or whether 
it had anything to do with the horses and the hens 
which a chance-opened back door showed us stabled in 
the rear of the hotel's grandiose entrance. 

Our tourist clientele, thanks I think to the allure of 
our concierge for all comers, was most respectable, 
though there was no public place for people to sit but 
a small reading-room colder than the baths of Apollo. 
But when he entered the place it was as if a fire were 
kindled in the minute stove never otherwise heated, 
and the old English and French newspapers freshened 
themselves up to the actual date as nearly as they could. 
We were mostly, perhaps, Spanish families come from 
our several provinces for a bit of the season which all 
Spanish families of civil condition desire more or less 
of: lean, dark fathers, slender, white-stuccoed daugh- 
ters, and fat, white-stuccoed mothers; very still-faced, 
and grave-mannered. We were also a few English, and 
from time to time a few Americans, but I believe we 

109 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

were not, however worthy, very great-world. The con- 
ciergu who had so skilfully got us together was instant 
in our errands and commissions, and when it came to 
two of as being shut up with colds brought from Bur- 
gos it vas he who supplemented the promptness of the 
apothecaries in sending our medicines and coming him- 
self at times to ask after our welfare. 



IX 



In a stransre countrv all the details of life are inter- 
esting, and we noticed with peculiar interest that Spain 
was a country where the prescriptions were written 
in the vulgar tongue instead of the little Latin in which 
prescriptions are addressed to the apothecaries of other 
lands. We were disposed to praise the faculty if not 
the art for this, but our doctor forbade. He said it 
was because the Spanish apothecaries were so unlearned 
that they could not read even so little Latin as the 
shortest prescription contained. Still I could not think 
the custom a bad one, though founded on ignorance, 
and I do not see why it should not have made for the 
greater safety of those who took the medicine if those 
who put it up should follow a formula in their native 
tongue. I know that at any rate we found the Span- 
ish medicines beneficial and were presently suffered to 
go out-of-doors, but with those severe injunctions against 
going out after nightfall or opening our lips when we 
went out by day. It was rather a bother, but it was 
fine to feel one's self in the classic Madrid tradition 
of danger from pneumonia and to be of the dignified 
company of the Spanish gentlemen whom we met with 
the border of their cloaks over their mouths ; like being 

a character in a capa y espada drama. 

110 



PHASES OF MADRID 

There was almost as little acted as spoken drama 
in the streets. I have given my impression of the 
songlessness of Spain in Madrid as elsewhere, but if 
there was no street singing there was often street play- 
ing by pathetic bands of blind minstrels with guitars 
and mandolins. The blind abound everywhere in Spain 
in that profession of street beggary which I always 
encouraged, believing as I do that comfort in this un- 
balanced world cannot be too constantly reminded of 
misery. As the hunchbacks are in Italy, or the wooden 
peg-legged in England, so the blind are in Spain for 
number. I could not say how touching the sight of 
their sightlessness was, or how the remembrance of it 
makes me wish that I had carried more coppers with 
me when I set out. I would gladly authorize the 
reader when he goes to Madrid to do the charity I often 
neglected; he will be the better man, or even woman, 
for it; and he need not mind if his beneficiary is oc- 
casionally unworthy; he may be unworthy himself; I 
am sure I was. 

But the Spanish street is rarely the theatrical spec- 
tacle that the Italian street nearly always is. Now 
and then there was a bit in Madrid which one would 
be sorry to have missed, such as the funeral of a 
civil magistrate, otherwise unknown to me, which I saw 
pass my cafe window : a most architectural black hearse, 
under a black roof, drawn by eight black horses, sable- 
plumed. The hearse was open at the sides, with the 
coffin fully showing, and a gold-laced chapeau bras lying 
on it. Behind came twenty or twenty-five gentlemen 
on foot in the modern ineffectiveness of frock-coats and 
top-hats, and after them eight or ten closed carriages. 
The procession passed without the least notice from the 
crowd, which I saw at other times stirred to a flutter of 

emulation in its small bovs by companies of infantry 

ill 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

marching to the music of sharply blown bugles. The 
men were handsomer than Italian soldiers, but not so 
handsome as the English, and in figure they were not 
quite the deplorable pigmies one often sees in France. 
Their bugles, with the rhythmical note which the tram- 
cars sound, and the guitars and mandolins of the blind 
minstrels, made the only street music I remember in 
Madrid. 

Between the daily rains, which came in the after- 
noon, the sun was sometimes very hot, but it was always 
cool enough indoors. The indoors .interests were not 
the art or story of the churches. The intensest Catholic 
capital in Christendom is in fact conspicuous in noth- 
ing more than the reputed uninterestingness of its 
churches. I went into one of them, however, with a 
Spanish friend, and I found it beautiful, most original, 
and most impressive for its architecture and painting, 
but I forget which church it was. We were going 
rather a desultory drive through those less frequented 
parts of the city which I have mentioned as like a 
sort of muted Naples: poor folk living much out-of- 
doors, buying and selling at hucksters' stands and 
booths, and swarming about the chief market, where 
the guilty were formerly put to death, but the innocent 
are now provisioned. Outside the market was not at- 
tractive, and what it was within we did not look to see. 
We went rather to satisfy my wish to see whether the 
Manzanares is as groveling a stream as the guide-books 
pretend in their effort to give a just idea of the natural 
disadvantages of Madrid, as the only great capital with- 
out an adequate river. But whether abetted by the arts 
of my friend or not, the Manzanares managed to con- 
ceal itself from me; when we left our carriage and 
went to look for it, I saw only some pretty rills and 

falls which it possibly fed and which lent their beauty 

112 



PHASES OF MADRID 

to the charming up and down hill walks, now a public 
pleasaunce, but formerly the groves and gardens of 
the royal palace. Our talk in Spanish from him and 
Italian from me was of Tolstoy and several esthetic 
and spiritual interests, and when we remounted and 
drove back to the city, whom should I see, hard by 
the King's palace, but those dear Chilians of my heart 
whom we had left at Valladolid — husband, wife, sister, 
with the addition of a Spanish lady of very acceptable 
comeliness, in white gloves, and as blithe as they. In 
honor of the capital the other ladies wore white gloves 
too, but the husband and brother still kept the straw 
hat which I had first known him in at San Sebastian, 
and which I hope yet to know him by in New York. 
It was a glad clash of greetings which none of us tried 
to make coherent or intelligible, and could not if we 
had tried. They acclaimed their hotel, and I ours; 
but on both sides I dare say we had our reserves; and 
then we parted, secure that the kind chances of travel 
would bring us together again somewhere. 



I did not visit the palace, but the Koyal Armory 
I had seen two days before on a gay morning that 
had not yet sorrowed to the afternoon's rain. At the 
gate of the palace I fell into the keeping of one of the 
authorized guides whom I wish I could identify so that 
I could send the reader to pay him the tip I came 
short in. It is a pang to think of the repressed dis- 
appointment in his face when in a moment of insensate 
sparing I gave him the bare peseta to which he was 
officially entitled, instead of the two or three due his 
zeal and intelligence; and I strongly urge my readers 

113 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

to be on their guard against a mistaken meanness like 
mine. I can never repair that, for if I went back to 
the Royal Armory I should not know him by sight, 
and if I sought among the guides saying I was the 
stranger who had behaved in that shabby sort, how 
would that identify me among so many other shabby 
strangers ? He had the intelligence to leave me and 
the constant companion of these travels to ourselves as 
we went about that treasury of wonders, but before 
we got to the armory he stayed us with a delicate 
gesture outside the court of the palace till a troop 
for the guard-mounting had gone in. Then he led us 
across the fine, beautiful quadrangle to the door of the 
museum, and waited for us there till we came out. By 
this time the space was brilliant with the confronted 
bodies of troops, those about to be relieved of guard 
duty, and those come to relieve them, and our guide 
got us excellent places where we could see everything 
and yet be out of the wind which was beginning to blow 
cuttingly through the gates and colonnades. There 
were all arms of the service — horse, foot, and artillery ; 
and the ceremony, with its pantomime and parley, was 
much more impressive than the changing of the colors 
which I had once seen at Buckingham Palace. The 
Spanish privates took the business not less seriously 
than the British, and however they felt the Spanish 
officers did not allow themselves to look bored. The 
marching and countermarching was of a refined state- 
liness, as if the pace were not a goose step but a pea- 
cock step ; and the music was of an exquisitely plaintive 
and tender note, which seemed to grieve rather than 
exult; I believe it was the royal march which they 
were playing, but I am not versed in such matters. 
Nothing could have been fitter than the quiet beauty 

of the spectacle, opening through the westward colon- 

" 114 



PHASES OF MADRID 

nade to the hills and woods of the royal demesne, with 
yellowing and embrowning trees that billowed from dis- 
tance to distance. Some day these groves and forests 
must be for the people's pleasure, as all royal belong- 
ings seem finally to be ; and in the mean time I did not 
grudge the landscape to the young king and queen who 
probably would not have grudged it to me. Our guide 
valued himself upon our admiration of it ; without our 
special admiration he valued himself upon the impres- 
sive buildings of the railway station in the middle 
distance. I forget whether he followed us out of the 
quadrangle into the roadway where we had the advan- 
tage of some picturesque army wagons, and some 
wagoners in red-faced jackets and red trousers, and 
top-boots with heavy fringes of leathern strings. Yet 
it must have been he who made us aware of a high- 
walled inclosure where soldiers found worthy of death 
by court martial could be conveniently shot; though I 
think we discovered for ourselves the old woman curled 
up out of the wind in a sentry-box, and sweetly asleep 
there while the boys were playing marbles on the smooth 
ground before it. I must not omit the peanut-roaster 
in front of the palace ; it was in the figure of an ocean 
steamer, nearly as large as the Lusitania, and had smoke 
coming out of the funnel, with rudder and screw com- 
plete and doll sailors climbing over the rigging. 

But it is impossible to speak adequately of the things 
in that wonderful armory. If the reader has any 
pleasure in the harnesses of Spanish kings and cap- 
tains, from the great Charles the Fifth down through 
all the Philips and the Charleses, he can glut it there. 
Their suits begin almost with their steel baby clothes, 
and adapt themselves almost to their senile decrepitude. 
There is the horse-litter in which the great emperor 

was borne to battle, and there is the sword which 

115 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

Isabella the great queen wore; and I liked looking at 
the lanterns and the flags of the Turkish galleys from 
the mighty sea-fight of Lepanto, and the many other 
trophies won from the Turks. The pavilion of Francis 
I. taken at Pavia was of no secondary interest, and 
everywhere was personal and national history told in 
the weapons and the armor of those who made the his- 
tory. Perhaps some time the peoples will gather into 
museums the pens and pencils and chisels of authors 
and artists, and the old caps and gowns they wore, or 
the chairs they sat in at their work, or the pianos and 
violoncellos of famous musicians, or the planes of sur- 
passing carpenters, or the hammers of eminent iron- 
workers; but these things will never be so picturesque 
as the equipments with which the military heroes saved 
their own lives or took others'. We who have never 
done either must not be unreasonable or impatient. It 
will be many a long century yet before we are appre- 
ciated at the value we now set upon ourselves. In 
the mean while we do not have such a bad time, and 
we are not so easily forgotten as some of those princes 
and warriors. 



XI 



One of the first errors of our search for the Archaeo- 
logical Museum, promoted by the mistaken kindness of 
people we asked the way, found us in the Academy of 
Fine Arts, where in the company of a fat and flabby 
Rubens (Susanna, of course, and those filthy Elders) 
we chanced on a portrait of Goya by himself: a fine 
head most takingly shrewd. But there was another 
portrait by him, of the ridiculous Godoy, Prince of 
the Peace, a sort of handsome, foolish fleshy George 

Fourthish person looking his character and history: 

116 






PHASES OF MADRID 

one of the mlost incredible parasites who ever fattened 
on a nation. This impossible creature, hated more 
than feared, and despised more than hated, who mis- 
ruled a generous people for twenty-five years, through- 
out the most heroic period of their annals, the low-born 
paramour of their queen and the beloved friend of the 
king her husband, who honored and trusted him with 
the most pathetic single-hearted and simple-minded de- 
votion, could not look all that he was and was not; 
but in this portrait by Goya lie suggested his unutter- 
able worthlessness : a worthlessness which you can only 
begin to realize by successively excluding all the virtues, 
and contrasting it with the sort of abandon of faith on 
the part of the king ; this in the common imbecility, the 
triune madness of the strange group, has its sublimity. 
In the next room are two pieces of Goya's which re- 
call in their absolute realism another passage of Span- 
ish history with unparalleled effect. They represent, 
one the accused heretics receiving sentence before a 
tribunal of the Inquisition, and the other the execution 
of the sentence, where the victims are mocked by a 
sort of fools' caps inscribed with the terms of their 
accusal. Their faces are turned on the spectator, who 
may forget them if he can. 

s I had the help of a beautiful face there which Goya 
had also painted: the face of Moratin, the historian 
of the Spanish drama whose book had been one of the 
consolations of exile from Spain in my Ohio village. 
That fine countenance rapt me far from where I stood, 
to the village, with its long maple-shaded summer after- 
noons, and its long lamp-lit winter nights when I was 
trying to find my way through Moratin's history of 
the Spanish drama, and somehow not altogether failing, 
so that fragments of the fact still hang about me. I 
wish now I could find the way back through it, or even 

117 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

to it, but between me and it there are so many forgotten 
passes that it would be hopeless trying. I can only 
remember the pride and joy of finding my way alone 
through it, and emerging from time to time into the 
light that glimmered before me. I cannot at all remem- 
ber whether it was before or after exploring this his- 
tory that I ventured upon the trackless waste of a 
volume of the dramatists themselves, where I faith- 
fully began with the earliest and came down to those 
of the great age when Cervantes and C alder on and 
Lope de Vega were writing the plays. It was either 
my misfortune that I read Lope and not Calderon, 
or that I do not recall reading Calderon at all, and 
know him only by a charming little play of Madrid 
life given ten or fifteen years ago by the pupils of 
the Dramatic Academy in New York. My lasting 
ignorance of this master was not for want of know- 
ing how great he was, especially from Lowell, who 
never failed to dwell on it when the talk was of 
Spanish literature. The fact is I did not get much 
pleasure out of Lope, but I did enjoy the great tragedy 
of Cervantes, and such of his comedies as I found in 
that massive volume. 

V I did not realize, however, till I saw that play of Cal- 
deron's, in New York, how much the Spanish drama 
has made Madrid its scene ; and until one knows modern 
Spanish fiction one cannot know how essentially the 
incongruous city is the capital of the Spanish imagina- 
tion. Of course the action of Gil Bias largely passes 
there, but Gil Bias in only adoptively a Spanish novel, 
and the native picaresque story is oftener at home in 
the provinces; but since Spanish fiction has come to 
full consciousness in the work of the modern masters 
it has resorted more and more to Madrid. If I speak 

only of Galdos and Valdes bv name, it is because I 

118 



PHASES OF MADRID 

know them best as the greatest of their time; but I 
fancy the allure of the capital has been felt by every 
other modern more or less; and if I were a Spanish 
author I should like to put a story there. If I were a 
Spaniard at all, I should like to live there a part of 
the year, or to come up for some sojourn, as the real 
Spaniards do. In such an event I should be able to 
tell the reader more about Madrid than I now know. 
I should not be poorly keeping to hotels and galleries 
and streets and the like surfaces of civilization; but 
should be saying all sorts of well-informed and sur- 
prising things about my fellow-citizens. As it is I 
have tried somewhat to say how I think they look to 
a stranger, and if it is not quite as they have looked 
to other strangers I do not insist upon my own stranger's 
impression. There is a great choice of good books 
about Spain, so that I do not feel bound to add to them 
with anything like finality. 

I have tried to give a sense of the grand-opera effect 
of the street scene, but I have record of only one passage 
such as one often sees in Italy where moments of the 
street are always waiting for transfer to the theater. A 
pair had posed themselves, across the way from our 
hotel, against the large closed shutter of a shop which 
made an admirable background. The woman in a black 
dress, with a red shawl over her shoulders, stood statu- 
esquely immovable, confronting the middle-class man 
who, while people went and came about them, poured 
out his mind to her, with many frenzied gestures, but 
mostly using one hand for emphasis. He seemed to be 
telling something rather than asserting himself or ac- 
cusing her; portraying a past fact or defining a situa- 
tion; and she waited immovably silent till he had fin- 
ished. Then she began and warmed to her work, but ap- 
parently without anger or prejudice. She talked herself 

119 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

out, as he had talked himself out. He waited and then 
he left her and crossed to the other corner. She called 
after him as he kept on down the street. She turned 
away, but stopped, and turned again and called after 
him till he passed from sight. Then she turned once 
more and went her own way. Xobody minded, any 
more than if they had been two unhappy ghosts in- 
visibly and inaudibly quarreling, but I remained, and 
remain to this day, afflicted because of the mystery of 
their dispute. 

We did not think there were so many boys, pro- 
portionately, or boys let loose, in Madrid as in the other 
towns we had seen, and we remarked to that sort of 
foreign sojourner who is so often met in strange cities 
that the children seemed like little men and women. 
" Yes," he said, " the Spaniards are not children until 
they are thirty or forty, and then they never grow up." 
It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have 
caught at a fact. From another foreign sojourner I 
heard that the Catholicism of Spain, in spite of all 
newspaper appearances to the contrary and many bold 
novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. 
But how far the severity of the church characterizes 
manners it would be hard to say. Perhaps these are 
often the effect of temperament. One heard more than 
one saw of the indifference of shop-keepers to shoppers 
in Madrid; in Andalusia, say especially in Seville, one 
saw nothing of it. But from the testimony of sufferers 
it appears to be the Madrid shop-keeper's reasonable 
conception that if a customer comes to buy something 
it is because he, or more frequently she, wants it and 
is more concerned than himself in the transaction. He 
does not put himself about in serving her, and if she 
intimates that he is rudely indifferent, and that though 
she has often come to him before she will never come 

120 



PHASES OF MADRID 

again, he remains tranquil. From experience I can- 
not say how true this is; but certainly I failed to 
awaken any lively emotion in the booksellers of whom 
I tried to buy some modern plays. It seemed to me 
that I was vexing them in the Oriental calm which 
they would have preferred to my money, or even my 
interest in the new Spanish drama. But in a shop 
where fans were sold, the shopman, taken in an un- 
guarded moment, seemed really to enter into the spirit 
of our selection for friends at home; he even corrected 
my wrong accent in the Spanish word for fan, which 
was certainly going a great way. 



XII 



^It was not the weather for fans in Madrid, where 
it rained that cold rain every afternoon, and once 
the whole of one day, and we could not reasonably 
expect to see fans in the hands of ladies in real life 
so much as in the pictures of ladies on the fans them- 
selves. In fact, I suppose that to see the Madrileiias 
most in character one should see them in summer which 
in southern countries is the most characteristic season. 
Theophile Gautier was governed by this belief when 
he visited Spain in the hottest possible weather, and 
left for the lasting delight of the world the record of 
that Voyage en Espagne which he made seventy-two 
years ago. He then thought the men better dressed 
than the women at Madrid. Their boots are as " var- 
nished, and they are gloved as white as possible. Their 
coats are correct and their trousers laudable; but the 
cravat is not of the same purity, and the waistcoat, 
that only part of modern dress where the fancy may 
play, is not always of irreproachable taste." As to 

121 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

the women : " What we understand in France as the 
Spanish type does not exist in Spain. . . One imagines 
usually, when one says mantilla and sehora, an oval, 
rather long and pale, with large dark eyes, surmounted 
with brows of velvet, a thin nose, a little arched, a 
mouth red as a pomegranate, and, above all, a tone 
warm and golden, justifying the verse of romance, ^hc 
is yellow like an orange. This is the Arab or Moorish 
type and not the Spanish type. The Madrilenas are 
charming in the full acceptation of the word; out of 
four three will be pretty ; but they do not answer at all 
to the idea we have of them. They are small, delicate, 
well formed, the foot narrow and the figure curved, 
the bust of a rich contour ; but their skin is very white, 
the features delicate and mobile, the mouth heart- 
shaped and representing perfectly certain portraits of 
the Regency. Often they have fair hair, and you can- 
not take three turns in the Prado without meeting eight 
blonds of all shades, from the ashen blond to the most 
vehement red, the red of the beard of Charles V. It 
is a mistake to think there are no blonds in Spain. Blue 
eyes abound there, but they are not so much liked as the 
black." 

Ms this a true picture of the actual ATadrilefias? 
What I say is that seventy-two years have passed since 
it was painted and the originals have had time to 
change. What I say is that it was nearly always rain- 
ing, and I could not be sure. What I say, above all, 
is that I am not a Frenchman of the high Romantic 
moment and that what I chiefly noticed was how beau- 
tiful the mantilla was whether worn by old or young, 
how fit, how gentle, how winning. I suppose that the 
women we saw walking in it were never of the highest 
class ; who would be driving except when we saw them 
going to church. But thev were often of the latest 

122 



PHASES OF MADKID 

fashion, with their feet hobbled by the narrow skirts, 
of which they lost the last poignant effect by not having 
wide or high or slonch or swashbuckler hats on; they 
were not top-heavy. What seems certain is that the 
Spanish women are short and slight or short and fat. 
I find it recorded that when a young English couple 
came into the Royal Armory the girl looked impossibly 
tall and fair. 

^The women of the lower classes are commonly hand- 
some and carry themselves finely ; their heads are bare, 
even of mantillas, and their skirts are ample. When it 
did not rain they added to the gaiety of the streets, 
and when it did to their gloom. Wet or dry the streets 
were always thronged; nobody, apparently, stayed in- 
doors who could go out, and after two days' housing, 
even with a fire to air and warm our rooms, we did not 
wonder at the universal preference. As I have said, the 
noise that we heard in the streets was mainly the clatter 
of shoes and hoofs, but now and then there were street 
cries besides those I have noted. There was in par- 
ticular a half-grown boy in our street who had a flat 
basket decorated with oysters at his feet, and for long 
hours of the day and dark he cried them incessantly. 
I do not know that he ever sold them or cared ; his affair 
was to cry them. 



VI 

A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

If you choose to make your visit to Toledo an episode 
of your stay in Madrid, you have still to choose be- 
tween going at eight in the morning and arriving back 
at five in the evening, or going at five one evening and 
coming back at the same hour the next. In either 
case you will have two hours' jolting each way over 
the roughest bit of railroad in the world, and if your 
mozo, before you could stop him, has selected for your 
going a compartment over the wheels, you can never be 
sure that he has done worse for you than you will have 
done for yourself when you come back in a compart- 
ment between the trucks. However you go or come, 
you remain in doubt whether you have been jolting over 
rails jointed at every yard, or getting on without any 
track over a cobble-stone pavement. Still, if the com- 
partment is wide and well cushioned, as it is in Spain 
nearly always, with free play for your person between 
roof and floor and wall and wall ; and if you go at five 
o'clock you have from your windows, as long as the 
afternoon light lasts, while you bound and rebound, 
glimpses of far-stretching wheat-fields, with nearer 
kitchen-gardens rich in beets and cabbages, alternating 
with purple and yellow patches of vineyard. 



' I find from my ever-faithful note-book that the land- 
scape seemed to grow drearier as we got away from 

124 






A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

Madrid, but this may have been the effect of the waning 
day: a day which at its brightest had been dim from 
recurrent rain and incessant damp. The gloom was not 
relieved by the long stops at the frequent stations, 
though the stops were good for getting one's breath, 
and for trying to plan greater control over one's activi- 
ties when the train should be going on again. The 
stations themselves were not so alluring that we were 
not willing to get away from them; and we were glad 
to get away from them by train, instead of by mule- 
team over the rainy levels to the towns that glimmered 
along the horizon twc or three miles off. There had 
been nothing to lift the heart in the sight of two small 
boys ready perched on one horse, or of a priest difficult- 
ly mounting another in his long robe. At the only 
station which I can remember having any town about 
it a large number of our passengers left the train, and 
I realized that they were commuters like those who 
might have been leaving it at some soaking suburb 
of Long Island or N"ew Jersey. In the sense of human 
brotherhood which the fact inspired I was not so lonely 
as I might have been, when we resumed our gloomy 
progress, with all that punctilio which custom demands 
of a Spanish way-train. First the station-master rings 
a bell of alarming note hanging on the wall, and the 
mozos run along the train shutting the car doors. After 
an interval some other official sounds a pocket whistle, 
and then there is still time for a belated passenger to 
find his car and scramble aboard. When the ensuing 
pause prolongs itself until you think the train has de- 
cided to remain all day, or all night, and several pas- 
sengers have left it again, the locomotive rouses itself 
and utters a peremptory screech. This really means 
going, but your doubt has not been fully overcome when 
the wheels begin to bump under your compartment, 

125 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

and you set your teeth and clutch your seat, and other- 
wise prepare yourself for the renewal of your acrobatic 
feats. I may not get the order of the signals for de- 
parture just right, hut T am sure of their number. 
Perhaps the Sud-Express starts with less, but the Sud- 
Express is partly French. 

It had been raining intermittently all day; now that 
the weary old day was done the young night took up 
the work and vigorously devoted itself to a steady down- 
pour which, when we reached our hotel in Toledo, had 
taken the role of a theatrical tempest, with sudden peals 
of thunder and long loud bellowing reverberations and 
blinding flashes of lightning, such as the wildest stage 
effects of the tempest in the Oatskills when Rip Van 
Winkle is lost would have been nothing to. Forebod- 
ing the inner chill of a Spanish hotel on such a day, 
we had telegraphed for a fire in our rooms, and our 
eccentricity had been interpreted in spirit as well as in 
letter. It was not the habitual hotel omnibus which 
met us at the station, but a luxurious closed carriage 
commanded by an interpreter who intuitively opened 
our compartment door, and conveyed us dry and warm 
to our hotel, in every circumstance of tender re- 
gard for our comfort, during the slow, sidelong up- 
hill climb to the city midst details of historic and 
romantic picturesqueness which the lightning mo- 
mently flashed in sight. From our carriage we 
passed as in a dream between the dress-coated head 
waiter and the skull-capped landlord who silently 
and motionlessly received us in the Gothic doorway, 
and mounted by a stately stair from a beautiful glass- 
roofed patio, columned round with airy galleries, to 
the rooms from which a smoky warmth gushed out to 
welcome us. 

The warmth was from the generous blaze kindled 
126 



A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

in the fireplace against onr coming, and the smoke was 
from the crevices in a chimneypiece not sufficiently 
calked with newspapers to keep the smoke going up 
the flue. The fastidious may think this a defect in our 
perfect experience, but we would not have had it other- 
wise, if we could, and probably we could not. We 
easily assumed that we were in the palace of some 
haughty hidalgo, adapted to the uses of a modern hotel, 
with a magical prevision which need not include the 
accurate jointing of a chimneypiece. The storm bel- 
lowed and blazed outside, the rain strummed richly 
on the patio roof which the lightning illumined, and 
as we descended that stately stair, with its walls ramped 
and foliaged over with heraldic fauna and flora, I felt 
as never before the disadvantage of not being still 
fourteen years old. 

VBut you cannot be of every age at once and it was 
no bad thing to be presently sitting down in my actual 
epoch at one of those excellent Spanish dinners which 
no European hotel can surpass and no American hotel 
can equal. It may seem a descent from the high horse, 
the winged steed of dreaming, to have been following 
those admirable courses with unflagging appetite, as 
it were on foot, but man born of woman is hungry 
after such a ride as ours from Madrid ; and it was with 
no appreciable loss to our sense of enchantment that 
we presently learned from our host, waiting skull- 
capped in the patio, that we were in no real palace of 
an ancient hidalgo, but were housed as we found our- 
selves by the fancy of a rich nobleman of Toledo whom 
the whim had taken to equip his city with a hotel of 
poetic perfection. T am afraid I have forgotten his 
name; perhaps I should not have the right to parade 
it here if I remembered it ; but I cannot help saluting 
him brother in imagination, and thanking him for one 

127 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

of the rarest pleasures that travel, even Spanish travel, 
has given me. 



ii 



One must recall the effect of such a gentle fantasy 
as his with some such emotion as one recalls a pleas- 
ant tale unexpectedly told when one feared a repetition 
of stale commonplaces, and I now feel a pang of retro- 
active self-reproach for not spending the whole evening 
after dinner in reading up the story of that most storied 
city where this Spanish castle received us. What better 
could I have done in the smoky warmth of our hearth- 
fire than to con, by the light of the electric bulb dangling 
overhead, its annals in some such voluntarily quaint 
and unconsciously old-fashioned volume as Irving's 
Legends of the Conquest of Spain; or to read in some 
such (if there is any such other) imperishably actual 
and unfadingly brilliant record of impressions as 
Gautier's Voyage en Espagne, the miserably tragic tale 
of that poor, wicked, over-punished last of the Gothic 
kings, Don Roderick? It comes to much the same 
effect in both, and as I knew it already from the notes 
to Scott's poem of Don Roderick, which I had read 
sixty years before in the loft of our log cabin (long 
before the era of my unguided Spanish studies), I 
found it better to go to bed after a day which had 
not been without its pains as well as pleasures. I 
could recall the story well enough for all purposes of 
the imagination as I found it in the fine print of those 
notes, and if I could believe the reader did not know 
it I would tell him now how this wretched Don Roderick 
betrayed the daughter of Count Julian whom her father 
had intrusted to him here in his capital of Toledo, 

when, with the rest of Spain, it had submitted to his 

128 






A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

rule. That was in the eighth century when the hearts 
of kings were more easily corrupted by power than 
perhaps in the twentieth; and it is possible that there 
was a good deal of politics mixed up with Count 
Julian's passion for revenge on the king, when he 
invited the Moors to invade his native land and helped 
them overrun it. The conquest, let me remind the 
reader, was also abetted by the Jews who had been 
flourishing mightily under the Gothic anarchy, but 
whom Don Roderick had reduced to a choice between 
exile or slavery when he came to full power. Every 
one knows how in a few weeks the whole peninsula 
fell before the invaders. Toledo fell after the battle 
of Guadalete, where even the Bishop of Seville fought 
on their side, and Roderick was lastingly numbered 
among the missing, and was no doubt killed, as nothing 
has since been heard of him. It was not until nearly 
three hundred years afterward that the Christians re- 
covered the city. By this time they were no longer 
Arians, but good Catholics; so good that Philip II. 
himself, one of the best of Catholics (as I have told), 
is said to have removed the capital to Madrid because 
he could not endure the still more scrupulous Catho- 
licity of the Toledan Bishop. 

Nobody is obliged to believe this, but I should be 
sorry if any reader of mine questioned the insurpassable 
antiquity of Toledo, as attested by a cloud of chron- 
iclers. Theophile Gautier notes that " the most mod- 
erate place the epoch of its foundation before the 
Deluge," and he does not see why they do not put 
the time " under the pre-Adamite kings, some years 
before the creation of the world. Some attribute the 
honor of laying its first stone to Jubal, others to the 
Greek; some to the Roman consuls Tolmor and Brutus; 
some to the Jews who entered Spain with Nebuchad- 

129 



FAMILIAE SPANISH TKAVELS 

nezzar, resting their theory on the etymology of Toledo, 
which comes from Toledoth, a Hebrew word signifying 
generations, because the Twelve Tribes had helped to 
build and people it." 

in 

Even if the whole of this was not accurate, it offered 
such an embarrassing abundance to the choice that I am 
glad I knew little or nothing of the antagonistic origins 
when I opened my window to the sunny morning which 
smiled at the notion of the overnight tempest, and 
lighted all the landscape on that side of the hotel. The 
outlook was over vast plowed lands red as Virginia or 
~New Jersey fields, stretching and billowing away from 
the yellow Tagus in the foreground to the mountain- 
walled horizon, with far stretches of forest in the middle 
distance. What riches of gray roof, of white wall, of 
glossy green, or embrowning foliage in the city gardens 
the prospect included, one should have the brush rather 
than the pen to suggest ; or else one should have an in- 
exhaustible ink-bottle with every color of the chromatic 
scale in it to pour the right tints. Mostly, however, 
I should say that the city of Toledo is of a mellow 
gray, and the country of Toledo a rich orange. Seen 
from any elevation the gray of the town made me think 
of Genoa; and if the reader's knowledge does not en- 
able him to realize it from this association, he had better 
lose no time in going to Genoa. 

N I myself should prefer going again to Toledo, where 
we made only a day's demand upon the city's wealth 
of beauty when a lifetime would hardly have exhausted 
it. Yet I would not counsel any one to pass his whole 
life in Toledo unless he was sure he could bear the 
fullness of that beauty. Add insurpassable antiquity, 

add tragedy, add unendurable orthodoxy, add the pathos 

130 



-■tJ'z 







A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

of hopeless decay, and I think I would rather give 
a day than a lifetime to Toledo. Or I would like to 
go back and give another day to it and come every 
year and give a day. This very moment, instead of 
writing of it in a high New York flat and looking 
out on a prospect incomparably sky-scrapered, I would 
rather be in that glass-roofed patio of our histrionic 
hotel, engaging the services of one of the most admir- 
able guides who ever fell to the lot of mortal Ameri- 
cans, while much advised by our skull-capped landlord 
to shun the cicerone of another hotel as " an Italian 
man," with little or no English. 

As soon as we appeared outside the beggars of Toledo 
swarmed upon us; but I hope it was not from them 
I formed the notion that the beauty of the place was 
architectural and not personal, though these poor things 
were as deplorably plain as they were obviously mis- 
erable. The inhabitants who did not ask alms were 
of course in the majority, but neither were these im- 
pressive in looks or bearing. Rather, I should say, 
their average was small and dark, and in color of eyes 
and hair as well as skin they suggested the African 
race that held Toledo for four centuries. Neither 
here nor anywhere else in Spain are there any traces 
of the Jews who helped bring the Arabs in; once for 
all, that people have been banished so perfectly that 
they do not show their noses anywhere. Possibly they 
exist, but they do not exist openly, any more than the 
descendants of the Moorish invaders practise their 
Moslem rites. As for the beggars, to whom I return as 
they constantly returned to us, it did not avail to do 
them charity; that by no means dispersed them; the 
thronging misery and mutilation in the lame, the halt 
and the blind, was as great at our coming back to our 
hotel as our going out of it. They were of every age 

131 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

and sex; the very school-children left their sports to 

chance our charity; and it is still with a pang that I 

remember the little girl whom we denied a copper when 

she was really asking for a florecito out of the nosegay 

that one of us carried. But how could we know that 

it was a little flower and not a " little dog " she wanted ? 

There was something vividly spectacular in the 

square, by no means large, which we came into on 

turning the corner from our hotel. It was a sort of 

market-place as well as business place, and it looked 

as if it might be the resort at certain hours of the 

polite as well as the impolite leisure of a city of leisure 

not apparently overworked in any of its classes. But 

at ten o'clock in the morning it was empty enough, and 

after a small purchase at one of the shops we passed 

from it without elbowing or being elbowed, and found 

ourselves at the portal of that ancient posada where 

Cervantes is said to have once sojourned at least long 

enough to write one of his Exemplary Novels. He was 

of such a ubiquitous habit that if we had visited every 

city of Spain we should have found some witness of 

his stay, but I do not believe we could have found any 

more satisfactory than this. It is verified by a tablet in 

its outer wall, and within it is convincingly a posada 

of his time. It has a large low-vaulted interior, with 

the carts and wagons of the muleteers at the right of 

the entrance, and beyond these the stalls of the mules 

where they stood chewing their provender, and glancing 

uninterestedly round at the intruders, for plainly we 

were not of the guests who frequent the place. Such, 

for a chamber like those around and behind the stalls, 

on the same earthen level, pay five cents of our money 

a day; they supply their own bed and board and pay 

five cents more for the use of a fire. 

Some guests were coming and going in the dim light 
132 






A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

of the cavernous spaces; others were squatting on the 
ground before their morning meal. An endearing 
smoke-browned wooden gallery went round three sides 
of the patio overhead ; half-way to this at one side rose 
an immense earthen watei jar, dim red; piles of straw 
mats, which were perhaps the bedding of the guests, 
heaped the ground or hung from the gallery; and the 
guests, among them a most beautiful youth, black as 
Africa, but of a Greek perfection of profile, regarded 
us with a friendly indifference that contrasted striking- 
ly with the fixed stare of the bluish-gray hound beside 
one of the wagons. He had a human effect of having 
brushed his hair from his strange grave eyes, and of a 
sad, hopeless puzzle in the effort to make us out. If 
he was haunted by some inexplicable relation in me 
to the great author whose dog he undoubtedly had been 
in a retroactive incarnation, and was thinking to ques- 
tion me of that ever unfulfilled boyish self -promise of 
writing the life of Cervantes, I could as successfully 
have challenged him to say how and where in such a 
place as that an Exemplary Novelist could have written 
even the story of The Illustrious Scullion. But he 
seemed on reflection not to push the matter with me, 
and I left him still lost in his puzzle while I came 
away in mine. Whether Cervantes really wrote one of 
his tales there or not, it is certain that he could have 
exactly studied from that posada the setting of the 
scene for the episode of the enchanted castle in Don 
Quixote, where the knight suffered all the demoniacal 
torments which a jealous and infuriate muleteer knew 
how to inflict. 

IV 

* Upon the whole I am not sure that I was more 

edified by the cathedral of Toledo, though I am afraid 

133 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

to own it, and must make haste to say that it is a 

cathedral surpassing in some things any other cathedral 

in Spain. Chiefly it surpasses them in the glory of that 

stupendous retablo which fills one whole end of the 

vast fane, and mounting from floor to roof, tells the 

Christian story with an ineffable fullness of dramatic 

detail, up to the tragic climax of the crucifixion, the 

Calvario, at the summit. Every fact of it fixes itself 

the more ineffaceably in the consciousness because of 

that cunningly studied increase in the stature of the 

actors, who always appear life-size in spite of their 

lift from level to level above the spectator. But what 

is the use, what is the use ? Am I to abandon the 

young and younger wisdom with which I have refrained 

in so many books from attempting the portrayal of any 

Italian, any English church, and fall into the folly, 

now that I am o]d, of trying to say again in words 

what one of the greatest of Spanish churches says in 

form, in color ? Let me rather turn from that vainest 

endeavor to the trivialities of sight-seeing which endear 

the memory of monuments and make the experience of 

them endurable. The beautiful choir, with its walls 

pierced in gigantic filigree, might have been art or 

not, as' one chose, but the three young girls who smiled 

and whispered with the young man near it were nature, 

which there could be no two minds about. They were 

pathetically privileged there to a moment of the free 

interplay of youthful interests and emotions which the 

Spanish convention forbids less in the churches than 

anywhere else. 

-The Spanish religion is, in fact, kind to the young 

in many ways, and on our way to the cathedral we 

had paused at a shrine of the Virgin in appreciation 

of her friendly offices to poor girls wanting husbands ; 

they have only to drop a pin inside the grating before 

134 



A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

her and draw a husband, tall for a large pin and short 
for a little one; or if they can make their offering in 
coin, their chances of marrying money are good. The 
Virgin is always ready to befriend her devotees, and 
in the cathedral near that beautiful choir screen she has 
a shrine above the stone where she alighted when she 
brought a chasuble to St. Tldefonso (she owed him 
something for his maintenance of her Immaculate Con- 
ception long before it was imagined a dogma) and left 
the print of her foot in the pavement. The fact is 
attested by the very simple yet absolute inscription: 

Quando la Reina del Cielo 
Puso los pies en el suelo, 
En esta piedra los puso, 

or as my English will have it: 

When the Queen of Heaven put 
Upon the earth her foot, 
She put it on this stone 

and left it indelible there, so that now if you thrust 
your finger through the grille and touch the place you 
get off three hundred years of purgatory: not much 
in the count of eternity, but still something. 

We saw a woman and a priest touching it as we stood 
by and going away enviably comforted; but we were 
there as connoisseurs, not as votaries ; and we were 
trying to be conscious solely of the surpassing grandeur 
and beauty of the cathedral. Here as elsewhere in 
Spain the passionate desire of the race to realize a fact 
in art expresses itself gloriously or grotesquely accord- 
ing to the occasion. The rear of the chorus is one vast 
riot of rococo sculpture, representing T do not know 
what mystical event; but down through the midst of 

the livingly studied performance a mighty angel comes 

135 



FAMILIAE SPANISH TRAVELS 

plunging, with his fine legs following his torso through 
the air, like those of a diver taking a header into the 
water. Nothing less than the sublime touch of those 
legs would have satisfied the instinct from which and 
for which the artist worked; they gave reality to the 
affair in every part. 

'I wish I could give reality to every part of that most 
noble, that most lovably beautiful temple. We had 
only a poor half-hour for it, and we could not do more 
than flutter the pages of the epic it was and catch here 
and there a word, a phrase : a word writ in architecture 
or sculpture, a phrase richly expressed in gold and 
silver and precious marble, or painted in the dyes of the 
dawns and sunsets which used to lend themselves so 
much more willingly to the arts than they seem to do 
now. From our note-books I find that this cathedral 
of Toledo appeared more wonderful to one of us than 
the cathedral of Burgos; but who knows? It might 
have been that the day was warmer and brighter and 
had not yet shivered and saddened to the cold rain it 
ended in. At any rate the vast church filled itself 
more and more with the solemn glow in which we left 
it steeped when we went out and took our dreamway 
through the narrow, winding, wandering streets that 
seemed to lure us where they would. One of them 
climbed with us to the Alcazar, which is no longer any 
great thing to see in itself, but which opens a hos- 
pitable space within its court for a prospect of so much 
of the world around Toledo, the world of yellow river 
and red fields and blue mountains, and white-clouded 
azure sky, that we might well have mistaken it for the 
whole earth. In itself, as I say, the Alcazar is no great 
thing for where it is, but if we had here in New York 
an Alcazar that remembered historically back through 

French, English, Arabic, Gothic. Roman, and Cartha- 

136 



A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

ginian occupations to the inarticulate Iberian past we 
should come, I suppose, from far and near to visit it. 
Now, however, after gasping at its outlook, we left it 
hopelessly, and lost ourselves, except for our kindly 
guide, in the crooked little stony lanes, with the sun 
hot on our backs and the shade cool in our faces. There 
were Moorish bits and suggestions in the white walls 
and the low flat roofs of the houses, but these were not 
so jealous of their privacy as such houses were once 
meant to be. Through the gate of one we were led 
into a garden of simple flowers belted with a world- 
old parapet, over which we could look at a stretch of 
the Gothic wall of King Wamba's time, before the 
miserable Koderick won and lost his kingdom. A pome- 
granate tree, red with fruit, overhung us, and from the 
borders of marigolds and zinnias and German clover 
the gray garden-wife gathered a nosegay for us. She 
said she was three duros and a half old, as who should 
say three dollars and a half, and she had a grim amuse- 
ment in so translating her seventy years. 



SEt was hard by her cottage that we saw our first 

mosque, which had begun by being a Gothic church, 

but had lost itself in paynim hands for centuries, in 

spite of the lamp always kept burning in it. Then 

one day the Cid came riding by, and his horse, at sight 

of a white stone in the street pavement, knelt down 

and would not budge till men came and dug through 

the wall of the mosque and disclosed this indefatigable 

lamp in the church. We expressed our doubt of the 

man's knowing so unerringly that the horse meant them 

to dig through the mosque. " If you can believe the 

rest I think you can believe that," our guide argued. 

137 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

He was like so many taciturn Spaniards, not in- 
conversable, and we had a pleasure in his unobtrusive 
intelligence which I should be sorry to exaggerate. lie 
supplied us with such statistics of his city as we brought 
away with us, and as I think the reader may join me 
in trusting, and in regretting that I did not ask more. 
Still it is something to have learned that in Toledo 
now each family lives English fashion in a house of 
its own, while in the other continental cities it mostly 
dwells in a flat. This is because the population has 
fallen from two hundred thousand to twenty thousand, 
and the houses have not shared its decay, but remain 
habitable for numbers immensely beyond those of the 
households. In the summer the family inhabits the 
first floor which the patio and the subterranean damp 
from the rains keep cool ; in the winter it retreats 
to the upper chambers which the sun is supposed to 
warm, and which are at any rate dry even on cloudy 
days. The rents would be thought low in ~New York : 
three dollars a month get a fair house in Toledo; but 
wages are low, too; three dollars a month for a man- 
servant and a dollar and a half for a maid. If the 
Toledans from high to low are extravagant in anything 
it is dress, but dress for the outside, not the inside, 
which does not show, as our guide satirically explained. 
They scrimp themselves in food and they pay the 
penalty in lessened vitality ; there is not so much fever 
as one might think; but there is a great deal of con- 
sumption ; and as we could not help seeing everywhere 
in the streets there were many blind, who seemed often- 
est to have suffered from smallpox. The beggars were 
not so well dressed as the other classes, but I saw no 
such delirious patchwork as at Burgos. On the other 
hand, there were no idle people who were fashionably 

dressed; no men or women who looked great-world. 

138 



\ 




AN ANCIENT CORNER OF THE CITY 



A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

Perhaps if the afternoon had kept the sunny promise 
of the forenoon they might have been driving in the 
Paseo, a promenade which Toledo has like every Span- 
ish city ; but it rained and we did not stop at the Paseo 
which looked so pleasant. 

The city, as so many have told and as I hope the 
reader will imagine, is a network of winding and 
crooked lanes, which the books say are Moorish, but 
which are medieval like those of every old city. They 
nowhere lend themselves to walking for pleasure, and 
the houses do not open their patios to the passer with 
Andalusian expansiveness ; they are in fact of a quite 
Oriental reserve. I remember no dwellings of the 
grade, quite, of hovels ; but neither do there seem to be 
many palaces or palatial houses in my hurried impres- 
sion. Whatever it may be industrially or ecclesiastical- 
ly, Toledo is now socially provincial and tending to 
extinction. It is so near Madrid that if I myself were 
living in Toledo I would want to live in Madrid, and 
only return for brief sojourns to mourn my want of 
a serious object in life; at Toledo it must be easy to 
cherish such an object. 

Industrially, of course, one associates it with the 
manufacture of the famous Toledo blades, which it is 
said are made as wonderful as ever, and I had a dim 
idea of getting a large one for decorative use in a 
New York flat. But the foundry is a mile out of town, 
and I only got so far as to look at the artists who en- 
grave the smaller sort in shops open to the public eye ; 
and my purpose dwindled to the purchase of a little 
pair of scissors, much as a high resolve for the famous 
marchpane of Toledo ended in a piece of that pastry 
about twice the size of a silver dollar. Not all of the 
twenty thousand people of Toledo could be engaged in 
these specialties, and I owe mvself to blame for not 
10 139 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

asking more about the local industries; but it is not 
too late for tbe reader, whom I could do no greater 
favor than sending him there, to repair my deficiency. 
In self-defense I urge my knowledge of a military 
school in the Alcazar, where and in the street leading 
up to it we saw some companies of the comely and 
kindly-looking cadets. I know also that there are pub- 
lic night schools where those so minded may study the 
arts and letters, as our guide was doing in certain 
directions. Now that there are no longer any Jews in 
Toledo, and the Arabs to whom they betrayed the Gothic 
capital have all been Christians or exiles for many 
centuries, we felt that we represented the whole alien 
element of the place; there seemed to be at least no 
other visitors of our lineage or language. 

VI 

We were going to spend the rest of the day driving 
out through the city into the country beyond the Tagus, 
and we drove off in our really splendid turnout through 
swarms of beggars whose prayers our horses' bells 
drowned when we left them to their despair at the 
hotel door. At the moment of course we believe that 
it was a purely dramatic misery which the wretched 
creatures represented; but sometimes I have since had 
moments of remorse in which I wish I had thrown 
big and little dogs broadcast among them. They could 
not all have been begging for the profit or pleasure of 
it; some of them were imaginably out of work and 
worthily ragged as I saw them, and hungry as I begin 
to fear them. I am glad now to think that many of 
them could not see with their poor blind eyes the face 
which I hardened against them, as we whirled away to 
the music of our horses' bells. 

140 



A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

The bells pretty well covered our horses from their 
necks to their haunches, a pair of gallant grays urged 
to their briskest pace by the driver whose short square 
face and humorous mouth and eyes were a joy whenever 
we caught a glimpse of them. He was one of those 
drivers who know everybody; he passed the time of 
day with all the men we met, and he had a joking com- 
pliment for all the women, who gladdened at sight of 
him from the thresholds where they sat sewing or knit- 
ting: such a driver as brings a gay world to home- 
keeping souls and leaves them with the feeling of 
having been in it. I would have given much more 
than I gave the beggars in Toledo to know just in what 
terms he and his universal acquaintance bantered each 
other ; but the terms might sometimes have been rather 
rank. Something, at any rate, qualified the air, which 
I fancied softer than that of Madrid, with a faint 
recurrent odor, as if in testimony of the driver's de- 
rivation from those old rancid Christians, as the Span- 
iards used to call them, whose lineage had never been 
crossed with Moorish blood. If it was merely some- 
thing the carriage had acquired from the stable, still 
it was to be valued for its distinction in a country 
of many smells; and I would not have been with- 
out it. 

When we crossed the Tagus by a bridge which a 
company of workmen willingly paused from mending 
to let us by, and remained standing absent-mindedly 
aside some time after we had passed, we found our- 
selves in a scene which I do not believe was ever sur- 
passed for spectacularity in any theater. I hope this 
is not giving the notion of something fictitious in it; 
I only mean that here Nature was in one of her most 
dramatic moods. The yellow torrent swept through a 

deep gorge of red earth, which on the farther side 

141 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

climbed in precipitous banks, cleft by enormous fissures, 
or chasms rather, to the wide plateau where the gray 
city stood. The roofs of mellow tiles formed a suc- 
cession of levels from which the irregular towers and 
pinnacles of the churches stamped themselves against 
a sky now filled with clouds, but in an air so clear 
that their beautiful irregularities and differences 
showed to one very noble effect. The city still 
looked the ancient capital of the two hundred thousand 
souls it once embraced, and in its stony repair there 
was no hint of decay. 

' On our right, the road mounted through country wild 
enough at times, but for the most part comparatively 
friendly, with moments of being almost homelike. 
There were slopes which, if massive always, were some- 
times mild and were gray with immemorial olives. In 
certain orchard nooks there were apricot trees, yellowing 
to the autumn, with red-brown withered grasses tangling 
under them. Men were gathering the fruit of the 
abounding cactuses in places, and in one place a peas- 
ant was bearing an arm-load of them to a wide stone 
pen in the midst of which stood a lordly black pig, with 
head lifted and staring, indifferent to cactuses, toward 
Toledo. His statuesque pose was of a fine hauteur, 
and a more imaginative tourist than I might have 
fancied him lost in a dream of the past, piercing be- 
yond the time of the Iberian autochtons to those pre- 
historic ages 

When wild in woods the noble savage ran, 

pursuing or pursued by his tusked aud bristled ancestor, 
and then slowly reverting through the different in- 
vasions and civilizations to that signal moment when, 
after three hundred Moslem years, Toledo became Chris- 
tian again forever, and pork resumed its primacv at 

142 



A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

the table. Dark, mysterious, fierce, the proud pig 
stood, a figure made for sculpture ; and if he had been 
a lion, with the lion's royal ideal of eating rather than 
feeding the human race, the reader would not have 
thought him unworthy of literature; I have seldom 
seen a lion that looked worthier of it. 

We must have met farmer-folk, men and women, on 
our way and have seen their white houses farther or 
nearer. But mostly the landscape was lonely and at 
times nightmarish, as the Castilian landscape has a 
trick of being, and remanded us momently to the awful 
entourage of our run from Valladolid to Madrid. We 
were glad to get back to the Tagus, which if awful is 
not grisly, but wherever it rolls its yellow flood lends 
the landscape such a sublimity that it was no esthetic 
descent from the high perch of that proud pig to the 
mighty gorge through which, geologically long ago, the 
river had torn its way. When we drove back the bridge- 
menders stood aside for us while we were yet far off, 
and the women came to their doorways at the sound 
of our bells for another exchange of jokes with our 
driver. By the time a protracted file of mules had 
preceded us over the bridge, a brisk shower had come 
up, and after urging our grays at their topmost speed 
toward the famous church of San Juan de los Reyes 
Catolicos, we still had to run from our carriage door 
through the rain. 

Happily the portal was in the keeping of one of those 
authorized beggars who guard the gates of heaven 
everywhere in that kind country, and he welcomed 
us so eagerly from the wet that I could not do less 
than give him a big dog at once. In a moment of con- 
fusion I turned about, and taking him for another 
beggar, I gave him another big dog; and when we 
came out of the church he had put off his cap and ar- 

143 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

ranged so complete a disguise with the red handker- 
chief bravely tied round his head, that my innocence 
was again abused, and once more a big dog passed be- 
tween us. But if the merit of the church might only be 
partially attributed to him, he was worth the whole 
three. The merit of the church was .incalculable, for 
it was meant to be the sepulcher of the Catholic Kings, 
who were eventually more fitly buried in the cathedral 
at Granada, in the heart of their great conquest; and 
it is a most beautiful church, of a mingled Saracenic 
plateresque Gothic, as the guide-books remind me, and 
extravagantly baroque as I myself found it. I person- 
ally recall also a sense of chill obscurity and of an airy 
gallery wandering far aloof in the upper gloom, which 
remains overhead with me still, and the yet fainter sense 
of the balconies crowning like capitals the two pillars 
fronting the high altar. I am now sorry for our haste, 
but one has not so much time for enjoying such churches 
in their presence as for regretting them in their ab- 
sence. One should live near them, and visit them daily, 
if one would feel their beauty in its^ recondite details ; 
to have come three thousand miles for three minutes 
of them is no way of making that beauty part of one's 
being, and I will not pretend that I did in this case. 
What I shall always maintain is that I had a living 
heartache from the sight of that space on the fa§ade 
of this church which is overhung with the chains of 
the Christian captives rescued from slavery among the 
Moors by the Catholic Kings in their conquest of 
Granada. They were not only the memorials of the 
most sorrowful fact, but they represented the misery 
of a thousand years of warfare in which the prisoners 
on either side suffered in chains for being Moslems or 
being Christians. The manacles and the fetters on the 
church front are merely decorative to the glance, but 

144 



A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

to the eye that reads deeper, how structural in their 
tale of man's inhumanity to man! How heavily they 
had hung on weary limbs! How pitilessly they had 
eaten through bleeding ulcers to the bone! Yet they 
were very, very decorative, as the flowers are that bloom 
on battle-fields. 

Even with only a few minutes of a scant quarter- 
hour to spare, I would not have any one miss seeing 
the cloister, from which the Catholic Kings used to enter 
the church by the gallery to those balcony capitals, 
but which the common American must now see by going 
outside the church. The cloister is turned to the uses 
of an industrial school, as we were glad to realize be- 
cause our guide, whom we liked so much, was a night 
student there. It remains as beautiful and reverend 
as if it were of no secular use, full of gentle sculptures, 
with a garden in the middle, raised above the pave- 
ment with a border of thin tiles, and flower-pots stand- 
ing on their coping, all in the shadow of tall trees, over- 
hanging a deep secret-keeping well. From this place, 
where you will be partly sheltered from the rain, your 
next profitable sally through the storm will be to Santa 
Maria la Blanca, once the synagogue of the richest 
Jews of Toledo, but now turned church in spite of its 
high authorization as a place of Hebrew worship. It 
was permitted them to build it because they declared 
they were of that tribe of Israel which, when Caiaphas, 
the High Priest, sent round to the different tribes for 
their vote whether Jesus should live or die, alone voted 
that He should live. Their response, as Theophile 
Gautier reports from the chronicles, is preserved in 
the Vatican with a Latin version of the Hebrew text. 
The fable, if it is a fable, has its pathos; and I for 
one can only lament the religious zeal to which the 
preaching of a fanatical monk roused the Christian 

145 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

neighborhood in the fifteenth century, to such excess 
that these kind Jews were afterward forbidden their 
worship in the place. It is a very clean-looking, cold- 
looking white monument of the Catholic faith, with a 
retablo attributed to Berruguete, and much plateresque 
Gothic detail mingled with Byzantine ornament, and 
Moorish arabesquing and the famous stucco honey- 
combing which we were destined at Seville and Granada 
to find almost sickeningly sweet. Where the Rabbis 
read the law from their pulpit the high altar stands, 
and the pious populace has for three hundred years 
pushed the Jews from the surrounding streets, where 
they had so humbled their dwellings to the lowliest lest 
they should rouse the jealousy of their sleepless enemies. 

VII 

When we had visited this church there remained only 
the house of the painter known as El Greco, for whom 
we had formed such a distaste, because of the long 
features of the faces in his pictures, that our guide 
could hardly persuade us his house was worth seeing. 
Now I am glad he prevailed with us, for we have since 
come to find a peculiar charm in these long features 
and the characteristic coloring of El Greco's pictures. 
The little house full of memorials and the little garden 
full of flowers, which ought to have been all forget-me- 
nots, were entirely delightful. As every one but I 
knew, and even I now know, he was born a Greek 
with the name of Theotocopuli, and studied under 
Titian till he found his account in a manner of his 
own, making long noses and long chins and high nar- 
row foreheads in ashen gray, and at last went mad in 
the excess of his manner. The house has been restored 

by the Marquis de la Ve2:a, according to his notion of 

146 









A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

an old Spanish house, and has the pleasantest small 
patio in the world, looked down into from a carved 
wooden gallery, with a pavement of red tiles inter set 
with Moorish tiles of divers colors. There are inter- 
esting pictures everywhere, and on one wall the cer- 
tificate of the owner's membership in the Hispanic 
Society of America, which made me feel at home be- 
cause it was signed with the name of an American 
friend of mine, who is repressed by prosperity from 
being known as a poet and one of the first Spanish 
scholars of any time. 

The whole place is endearingly homelike and so gen- 
uinely hospitable that we almost sat down to luncheon 
in the kitchen with the young Spanish king who had 
lunched with the Marquis there a few weeks before. 
There was a veranda outside where we could linger 
till the rain held up, and look into the garden where 
the flowers ought to have been forget-me-nots, but were 
as usual mostly marigolds and zinnias. They crowded 
round tile-edged pools, and other flowers bloomed in 
pots on the coping of the garden-seats built up of thin 
tiles carved on their edges to an inward curve. It is 
strongly believed that there are several stories under 
the house, and the Marquis is going some day to dig 
them up or out to the last one where the original Jew- 
ish owner of the house is supposed to have hid his 
treasure. In the mean time we could look across the 
low wall that belted the garden in, to a vacant ground 
a little way off where some boys were playing with a 
wagon they had made. They hnd made it out of an 
oblong box, with wheels so rudely and imperfectly 
rounded, that they wabbled fearfully and at times 
gave way under the body: just as they did with the 
wagons that the boys I knew seventy years ago used to 
make. 

147 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

I became so engrossed in the spectacle, so essentially 
a part of the drama, that I did not make due account 
of some particulars of the subterranean six stories of 
El Greco's house. There must have been other things 
worth seeing in Toledo, thousands of others, and some 
others we saw, but most we missed, and many I do not 
remember. It was now coming the hour to leave 
Toledo, and we drove back to our enchanted castle for 
our bill, and for the omnibus to the station. I thought 
for some time that there was no charge for the fire, or 
even the smoke we had the night before, but my eyes 
were holden from the item which I found later, by 
seeing myself addressed as Milor. I had never been 
addressed as a lord in any bill before, but I reflected 
that in the proud old metropolis of the Goths I could 
not be saluted as less, and I gladly paid the bill, which 
observed a golden mean between cheapness and dear- 
ness, and we parted good friends with our host, and 
better with our guide, who at the last brought out an 
English book, given him by an English friend, about 
the English cathedrals. He was fine, and I could not 
wish any future traveler kinder fortune than to have 
his guidance in Toledo. Some day I am going back 
to profit more fully by it, and to repay him the vari- 
ous fees which he disbursed for me to different door- 
keepers and custodians and which I forgot at parting 
and he was too delicate to remind me of. 

When all leaves were taken and we were bowed out 
and away our horses, covered with bells, burst with the 
omnibus through a solid mass of beggars come to give 
us a last chance of meriting heaven by charity to them, 
and dashed down the hill to the station. There we sat 
a long half -hour in the wet evening air, wondering how 
we had been spared seeing those wretches trampled un- 
der our horses' feet, or how the long train of goats 

148 






A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO 

climbing to the city to be milked escaped our wheels. 
But as we were guiltless of inflicting either disaster, 
we could watch with a good conscience the quiescent 
industry of some laborers in the brickyard beyond the 
track. Slowly and more slowly they worked, wearily, 
apathetically, fetching, carrying, in their divided 
skirts of cross-barred stuff of a rich Velasquez dirt 
color. One was especially worthy of admiration from 
his wide-brimmed black hat and his thoughtful indif- 
ference to his task, which was stacking up a sort of 
bundles of long grass; but I dare say he knew what 
it all meant. Throughout I was tormented by ques- 
tion of the precise co-racial quality of some English- 
speaking folk who had come to share our bone-breaking 
return to Madrid in the train so deliberately waiting 
there to begin afflicting us. English English they cer- 
tainly were not; American English as little. If they 
were Australian English, why should not it have been 
a convention of polite travel for them to come up and 
say so, and save us that torment of curiosity ? But per- 
haps they were not Australians. 



VII 
THE GEEAT GEIDIEON OF ST. LAWRENCE 

It seems a duty every Protestant owes his heresy 
to go and see how dismally the arch-enemy of heresy 
housed his true faith in the palace-tomb-and-church of 
the Escorial. If the more light-minded tourist shirks 
this act of piety, he makes a mistake which he will 
repent afterward in vain. The Escorial is, for its 
plainness, one of the two or three things worthiest see- 
ing among the two or three hundred things worth seeing 
in Spain. Yet we feigned meaning to miss it after 
we returned to Madrid from Toledo, saying that every- 
body went to the Escorial and that it would be a proud 
distinction not to go. All the time we knew we should 
go, and we were not surprised when we were chosen 
by one of our few bright days for the excursion, though 
we were taken inordinately early, and might well have 
been started a little later. 



Nothing was out of the common on the way to the 
station, and our sense of the ordinary was not relieved 
when we found ourselves in a car of the American 
open-saloon pattern, well filled with other Americans 
bent upon the same errand as ourselves; though I am 
bound to say that the backs of the transverse seats 

150 



THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE 

rose well toward the roof of the car with a certain 
originality. 

xWhen we cleared the city streets and houses, we be- 
gan running out into the country through suburbs vul- 
garly gay with small, bright brick villas, so expressive 
of commuting that the eye required the vision of young 
husbands and fathers going in at the gates with garden- 
ing tools on their shoulders and under their arms. To 
be sure, the time of day and the time of year were 
against this ; it was now morning and autumn, though 
there was a vernal brilliancy in the air; and the grass, 
flattered by the recent rains, was green where we had 
last seen it gray. Along a pretty stream, which, for 
all I know may have been the Manzanares, it was so 
little, files of Lombardy poplars followed away very 
agreeably golden in foliage; and scattered about were 
deciduous-looking evergreens which we questioned for 
live-oaks. We were going northward over the track 
which had brought us southward to Madrid two weeks 
before, and by and by the pleasant levels broke into 
rough hills and hollows, strewn with granite boulders 
which, as our train mounted, changed into the savage 
rock masses of ~New Castile, and as we drew near the 
village of Escorial gave the scene the look of that very 
desolate country. But it could not be so gloomy in the 
kind sunlight as it was when lashed by the savage 
storm which we had seen it cowering under before ; and 
at the station we lost all feeling of f riendlessness in the 
welcome of the thronging guides and hotel touters. 

Our ideal was a carriage which we could keep 
throughout the day and use for our return to the 
train in the afternoon; and this was so exactly the 
ideal of a driver to whom we committed ourselves that 
we were somewhat surprised to have his vehicle develop 
into a motor-omnibus, and himself into a conductor. 

151 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

When we arrived at the palace some miles off, up a 
winding way, he underwent another change, and became 
our guide to the Escorial. In the event he proved a 
very intelligent guide, as guides go, and I really can- 
not now see how we could have got on without him. 
He adapted the Spanish names of things to our Eng- 
lish understanding by shortening them ; a patio became 
a patf , and an old master an old mast' ; and an endear- 
ing quality was imparted to the grim memory of Philip 
II. by the diminutive of Philly. We accepted this, but 
even to have Charles V. brought nearer our hearts as 
Charley Eif, we could not bear to have our guide ex- 
posed to the mockery of less considerate travelers. I 
instructed him that the emperor's name was Charles, 
and that only boys and very familiar friends of that 
name were called Charley among us. He thanked me, 
and at once spoke again of Charley Eif ; which I after- 
ward found was the universally accepted style of the 
great emperor among the guides of Spain. In vain I 
tried to persuade them out of it at Cordova, at Seville, 
at Granada, and wherever else they had to speak of 
an emperor whose memory really seems to pervade the 
whole land. 



ii 



The genuine village of Escorial lies mostly to the 
left of the station, but the artificial town which grew 
up with the palace is to the right. Both are called 
after the slag of the iron-smelting works which were 
and are the vital industry of the first Escorial; but 
the road to the palace takes you far from the slag, with 
a much-hoteled and garden-walled dignity, to the 
plateau, apparently not altogether natural, where the 
massive triune edifice stands in the keeping of a throng 

152 



I 



THE GKEAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE 

of American women wondering how they are going to 
see it, and lunch, and get back to their train in time. 
Many were trying, the day of our visit, to see the place 
with no help but that of their bewildering Baedekers, 
and we had constant reason to be glad of our guide 
as we met or passed them in the measureless courts and 
endless corridors. 

\At this distance of time and place we seem to have 
hurried first to the gorgeous burial vault where the 
kings and queens of Spain lie, each one shut in a gilded 
marble sarcophagus in their several niches of the cir- 
cular chamber, where under the high altar of the church 
they have the advantage of all the masses said above 
them. But on the way we must have passed through 
the church, immense, bare, cold, and sullener far than 
that sepulcher; and I am sure that we visited last of 
all the palace, where it is said the present young king 
comes so seldom and unwillingly, as if shrinking from 
the shelf appointed for him in that crypt shining with 
gold and polished marble. 

It is of death, not life, that the Escorial preaches, 
and it was to eternal death, its pride and gloom, and 
not life everlasting, that the dark piety of Philip vol- 
untarily, or involuntarily, consecrated the edifice. But 
it would be doing a wrong to one of the greatest achieve- 
ments of the human will, if one dwelt too much, or too 
wholly, upon this gloomy ideal. The Escorial has been 
many times described ; I myself forbear with difficulty 
the attempt to describe it, and I satisfy my longing to 
set it visibly before the reader by letting an earlier 
visitor of my name describe it for me. I think he does 
it larger justice than modern observers, because he 
escapes the cumulative obligation which time has laid 
upon them to find the subjective rather than the ob- 
jective fulfilment of its founder's intention in it. At 

153 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

any rate, in March, 1623, James Howell, waiting as 
secretary of the romantic mission the bursting of the 
iridescent love-dream which had brought Charles Stuart, 
Prince of Wales, from England to woo the sister of the 
Spanish king in Madrid, had leisure to write one of his 
most delightful " familiar letters " concerning the Esco- 
rial to a friend in London. 

" I was yesterday at the Escorial to see the monastery 
of St. Lawrence, the eighth wonder of the world; and 
truly considering the site of the place, the state of 
the thing, the symmetry of the structure, with diverse 
other rareties, it may be called so; for what I have 
seen in Italy and other places are but baubles to it. 
It is built among a company of craggy hills, which 
makes the air the hungrier and wholesomer; it is 
all built of freestone and marble, and that with such 
solidity and moderate height that surely Philip the 
Second's chief design was to make a sacrifice of it to 
eternity, and to contest with the meteors and time it- 
self. It cost eight millions; it was twenty-four years 
abuilding, and the founder himself saw it furnished 
and enjoyed it twelve years after, and carried his bones 
himself thither to be buried. The reason that moved 
King Philip to waste so much treasure was a vow he 
had made at the battle of St. Quentin, where he was 
forced to batter a monastery of St. Lawrence friars, 
and if he had the victory he would erect such a monu- 
ment to St. Lawrence that the world had not the like ; 
therefore the form of it is like a gridiron, tEe Handle 
is a huge royal palace, and the body a vast monastery 
or assembly of quadrangular cloisters, for there are 
as many as there be months of the year. There be a 
hundred monks, and every one hath his man and his 
mule, and a multitude of officers; besides there are 
three libraries there full of the choicest books for all 

154 



"- 5? 












Copyright by Underwood A Underwood 

THE TOWN AND MONASTERY OP ESCORIAL 



THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE 

sciences. It is beyond all expression what grots, gar- 
dens, walks, and aqueducts there are there, and what 
curious fountains in the upper cloisters, for there be 
two stages of cloisters. In fine, there is nothing that is 
vulgar there. To take a view of every room in the 
house one must make account to go ten miles ; there is 
a vault called the Pantheon under the high altar, which 
is all paved, walled, and arched with marble; there be 
a number of huge silver candlesticks taller than I am ; 
lamps three yards compass, and diverse chalices and 
crosses of massive gold ; there is one choir made all of 
burnished brass; pictures and statues like giants; and 
a world of glorious things that purely ravished me. By 
this mighty monument it may be inferred that Philip 
the Second, though he was a little man, yet he had 
vast gigantic thoughts in him, to leave such a huge 
pile for posterity to gaze upon and admire in his 
memory." 



in 



Perhaps this description is riot very exact, but pre- 
cision of statement is not to be expected of a Welsh- 
man; and if Howell preferred to say Philip built the 
place in fulfilment of that vow at the battle of St. 
Quentin, doubtless he believed it; many others did; 
it has only of late been discovered that Philip was 
not at St. Quentin, and did not " batter a monastery 
of St. Lawrence friars " there. I like to think the rest 
is all as Howell says down to the man and mule for 
every monk. If there are no men and mules left, there 
are very few monks either, after the many suppressions 
of convents. The gardens are there of an unquestion- 
able symmetry and beauty, and the " company of craggy 
hills " abides all round the prodigious edifice, which is 

11 155 



FAMILIAE SPANISH TRAVELS 

at once so prodigious, and grows larger upon you in 
the retrospect. 

«Now that I am this good distance away, and can- 
not bring myself to book by a second experience, I feel 
it safe to say that I had a feeling of St. Peter's-like 
immensity in the church of the Escorial, with more than 
St. Peter's-like bareness. The gray colorlessness of the 
architectuiie somberly prevails in memory over the 
frescoes of the painters invited to relieve it in the 
roof and the retdblo, and thought turns from the red- 
and-yellow jasper of altar and pulpit, and the bronze- 
gilt effigies of kneeling kings and queens to that niche 
near the oratory where the little terrible man who im- 
agined and realized it all used to steal in from his 
palace, and worship next the small chamber where at 
last he died. It is said he also read despatches and 
state papers in this nook, but doubtless only in the 
intervals of devotion. 

Every one to his taste, even in matters of religion; 
Philip reared a temple to the life beyond this, and as 
if with the splendor of the mausoleum which it en- 
shrines he hoped to overcome the victorious grave ; the 
Caliph who built the mighty mosque at Cordova, which 
outlasts every other glory of his capital, dedicated it to 
the joy of this life as against the gloom of whose who 
would have put it under the feet of death. " Let us 
build," he said to his people, " the Kaaba of the West 
upon the site of a Christian temple, which we will 
destroy, so that we may set forth how the Cross shall 
fall and become abased before the True Prophet. Allah 
will never place the world beneath the feet of those 
who make themselves the slaves of drink and sensuality 
while they preach penitence and the joys of chastity, 
and while extolling poverty enrich themselves to the 
loss of their neighbors. For these the sad and silent 

156 



THE GKEAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE 

cloister; for us, the crystalline fountain and the shady 
grove ; for them, the rude and unsocial life of dungeon- 
like strongholds; for us, the charm of social life and 
culture; for them, intolerance and tyranny; for us, a 
ruler who is our father ; for them, the darkness of igno- 
rance ; for us, letters and instruction as wide-spread as 
our creed; for them, the wilderness, celibacy, and the 
doom of the false martyr ; for us, plenty, love, brother- 
hood, and eternal joy." 

In spite of the somewhat vaunting spirit of his ap- 
peal, the wager of battle decided against the Arab; 
it was the Crescent that fell, the Cross that prevailed; 
in the very heart of Abderrahman's mosque a Christian 
cathedral rises. Yet in the very heart of Philip's 
temple to the spirit of the cloister, the desert, the 
martyrdom, one feels that a great deal could be said 
on Abderrahman's side. This is a world which will 
not be renounced, in fact, and even in Christian Spain 
it has triumphed in the arts and sciences beyond its 
earlier victories in Moslem Spain. One finds Philip 
himself, with his despatches in that high nook, rather 
than among the bronze-gilt royalties at the high altar, 
though his statue is duly there with those of his three 
wives. The group does not include that poor Bloody 
Mary of England, who should have been the fourth 
there, for surely she suffered enough for his faith and 
him to be of his domestic circle forever. 



IV 

It is the distinct merit of the Escorial that it does 
not, and perhaps cannot take long in doing; otherwise 
the doer could not bear it. A look round the sumptu- 
ous burial chamber of the sovereigns below the high 

altar of the church; a glance at the lesser sepulchral 

157 



FAMILIAE SPANISH TRAVELS 

glories of the infantes and infantas in their chapels and 
corridors, suffices for the funereal third of the trinity 
of tomb and temple and palace; and though there are 
gayer constituents of the last, especially the gallery of 
the chapter-house, with its surprisingly lively frescoes 
and its sometimes startling canvases, there is not much 
that need really keep you from the royal apartments 
.which seem the natural end of your visit. Of these 
something better can be said than that they are no 
worse than most other royal apartments; our guide led 
us to them through many granite courts and corridors 
where we left groups of unguided Americans still 
maddening over their Baedekers; and we found them 
hung with pleasing tapestries, some after such designs 
of Goya's as one finds in the basement of the Prado. 
The furniture was in certain rooms cheerily upholstered 
in crimson and salmon without sense of color, but as if 
seeking relief from the gray of the church; and there 
are battle-pieces on the walls, fights between Moors and 
Christians, which interested me. The dignified consid- 
eration of the custodian who showed us through the 
apartments seemed to have adapted to our station a 
manner left over from the infrequent presence of 
royalty; as I have said, the young king of Spain does 
not like coming to the Escorial. 

J do not know why any one comes there, and I search 
my consciousness in vain for a better reason than the 
feeling that I must come, or would be sorrier if I did 
not than if I did. The worthy Howell does not com- 
mit himself to any expression of rejoicing or regretting 
in having done the Escorial. But the good Theophile 
Gautier, who visited the place more than two hundred 
years after, owns frankly that he is " excessively em- 
barrassed in giving his opinion " of it. " So many 

people," he says, " serious and well-conditioned, who, I 

158 



THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE 

prefer to think, have never seen it, have spoken of it as 
a chef d'ceuvre, and a supreme effort of the human 
spirit, so that I should have the air, poor devil of a 
facilletoniste errant, of wishing to play the original 
and taking pleasure in my contrary-mindedness ; but 
still in my soul and conscience I cannot help finding 
the Escorial the most tiresome and the most stupid 
monument that could be imagined, for the mortification 
of his fellow-beings, by a morose monk and a suspicious 
tyrant. I know very well that the Escorial had a 
serious and religious aim; but gravity is not dryness, 
melancholy is not marasm, meditation is not ennui, and 
beauty of forms can always be happily wedded to 
elevation of ideas/*' This is the Frenchman's language 
as he goes into the Escorial; he does not cheer up as 
he passes through the place, and when he comes out 
he has to say : " I issued from that desert of granite, 
from that monkish necropolis with an extraordinary 
feeling of release, of exultation ; it seemed to me I was 
born into life again, that I could be young once more, 
and rejoice in the creation of the good God, of which 
I had lost all hope in those funeral vaults. The bland 
and luminous air wrapt me round like a soft robe of 
fine wool, and warmed my body frozen in that cadaver- 
ous atmosphere; I was saved from that architectural 
nightmare, which I thought never would end. I ad- 
vise people who are so fatuous as to pretend that they 
are ever bored to go and spend three or four days in 
the Escorial; they will learn what real ennui is and 
they will enjoy themselves all the rest of their lives 
in reflecting that they might be in the Escorial and 
that they are not.'* 

That was well toward a century ago. It is not quite 
like that now, but it is something like it ; the human race 

has become inured to the Escorial; more tourists have 

159 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

visited the place and imaginably lightened its burden 
by sharing it among their increasing number. Still 
there is now and then one who is oppressed, crushed by 
it, and cannot relieve himself in such ironies as 
Gautier's, but must cry aloud in suffering like that 
of the more emotional De Amicis : " You approach a 
courtyard and say, ' I have seen this already.' ~No. 
You are mistaken; it is another. . . . You ask the 
guide where the cloister is and he replies, ' This is it,' 
and you walk on for half an hour. You see the light 
of another world: you have never seen just such a 
light; is it the reflection from the stone, or does it 
come from the moon ? ~No, it is daylight, but sadder 
than darkness. As you go on from corridor to corridor, 
from court to court, you look ahead with misgivings, 
expecting to see suddenly, as you turn a corner, a row 
of skeleton monks with hoods over their eyes and crosses 
in their hands; you think of Philip II. • . . You re- 
member all that you have read about him, of his terrors 
and the Inquisition; and everything becomes clear to 
your mind's eye with a sudden light ; for the first time 
you understand it all; the Escorial is Philip II. . . . 
He is still there alive and terrible, with the image of 
his dreadful God. . . . Even now, after so long a time, 
on rainy days, when I am feeling sad, I think of the 
Escorial, and then look at the walls of my room and 
congratulate myself. ... I see again the courtyards of 
the Escorial. ... I dream of wandering through the 
corridors alone in the dark, followed by the ghost of an 
old friar, crying and pounding at all the doors without 
\ finding a way of escape." 



\I am of another race both from the Frenchman and 

the Italian, and I cannot pretend to their experiences, 

160 




Copyright by Underwood & Underwood 
THE PANTHEON OF THE KINGS AND QUEENS OF SPAIN, UNDER THE HIGH 
ALTAR OF THE CHURCH, ESCORIAL 



THE GKEAT GKIDIKON OF ST. LAWEENCE 

their inferences, and their conclusions; but I am not 
going to leave the Escorial to the reader without try- 
ing to make him feel that I too was terribly impressed 
by it. To be sure, I had some light moments in it, 
because when gloom goes too far it becomes ridiculous ; 
and I did think the convent gardens as I saw them from 
the chapter-house window were beautiful, and the hills 
around majestic and serious, with no intention of fall- 
ing upon my prostrate spirit. Yes, and after a lifelong 
abhorrence of that bleak king who founded the Escorial, 
I will own that I am, through pity, beginning to feel 
an affection for Philip II. ; perhaps I was finally 
wrought upon by hearing him so endearingly called 
Philly by our guide. 

Yet I will not say but I was glad to get out of the 
Escorial alive; and that I welcomed even the sulkiness 
of the landlord of the hotel where our guide took us 
for lunch. To this day I do not know why that land- 
lord should have been so sour; his lunch was bad, but 
I paid his price without murmuring ; and still at part- 
ing he could scarcely restrain his rage; the Escorial 
might have entered into his soul. On the way to his 
hotel the street was empty, but the house bubbled over 
with children who gaped giggling at his guests from 
the kitchen door, and were then apparently silenced 
with food, behind it. There were a great many flies 
in the hotel, and if I could remember its name I would 
warn the public against it. 

After lunch our guide lapsed again to our con- 
ductor and reappeared with his motor-bus and took 
us to the station, where he overcame the scruples of 
the lady in the ticket-office concerning our wish to re- 
turn to Madrid by the Sud-Express instead of the 
ordinary train. The trouble was about the supple- 
mentary fare which we easily paid on board; in fact, 

161 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

there is never any difficulty in paying a supplementary 
fare in Spain ; the authorities meet you quite half-way. 
But we were nervous because we had already suffered 
from the delays of people at the last hotel where our 
motor-bus stopped to take up passengers ; they lingered 
so long over lunch that we were sure we should miss 
the Sud-Express, and we did not see how we could 
live in Escorial till the way-train started; yet for all 
their delays we reached the station in time and more. 
The train seemed strangely reduced in the number of 
its cars, but we confidently started with others to board 
the nearest of them; there we were waved violently 
away, and bidden get into the dining-car at the rear of 
the train. In some dudgeon we obeyed, but we were 
glad to get away from Escorial on any terms, and the 
dining-car was not bad, though it had a somewhat 
disheveled air. We could only suppose that all the 
places in the two other cars were taken, and we re- 
signed ourselves to choosing the least coffee-stained of 
the coffee-stained tables and ordered more coffee at it. 
The waiter brought it as promptly as the conductor 
collected our supplementary fare ; he even made a feint 
of removing the stains from our table-cloth with a 
flourish of his napkin, and then he left us to our con- 
jectures and reflections till he came for his pay and 
his fee just before we ran into Madrid. 



VI 

\ The mystery persisted and it was only when our 

train paused in the station that it was solved. There, 

as we got out of our car, we perceived that a broad 

red velvet carpet was laid from the car in front into the 

station ; a red carpet such as is used to keep the feet of 

162 



THE GKEAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE 

distinguished persons from their native earth the world 
over, but more especially in Europe. Along this carpet 
were loosely grouped a number of solemnly smiling 
gentlemen in frock-coats with their top-hats genteelly 
resting in the hollows of their left arms, and without 
and beyond the station in the space usually filled by 
closed and open cabs was a swarm of automobiles. 
Then while our spirits were keyed to the highest pitch, 
the Queen of Spain descended from the train, wearing 
a long black satin cloak and a large black hat, very 
blond and beautiful beyond the report of her pictures. 
By each hand she led one of her two pretty boys, Don 
Jaime, the Prince of Asturias, heir apparent, and his 
younger brother. She walked swiftly, with glad, kind 
looks around, and her ladies followed her according to 
their state; then ushered and followed by the gentle- 
men assembled to receive them, thev mounted to their 
motors and whirred away like so many persons of a 
histrionic pageant: not least impressive, the court at- 
tendants filled a stage drawn by six mules, and clat- 
tered after. 

From hearsay and reasonable surmise we learned 
that we had not come from Escorial in the Sud-Express 
at all, but in the Queen's special train bringing her and 
her children from their autumn sojourn at La Granja, 
and that we had been for an hour a notable feature 
of the royal party without knowing it, and of course 
without getting the least good of it. We had indeed 
ignorantly enjoyed no less of the honor than two other 
Americans, who came in the dining-car with us, but 
whether the nice-looking Spanish couple who sat in the 
corner next us were equally ignorant of their advantage 
I shall never know. It was but too highly probable 
that the messed condition of the car was due to royal 
luncheon in it just before we came aboard; but why 

163 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

we were suffered to come aboard, or why a supple- 
mentary fare should have been collected from us re- 
mains one of those mysteries which I should once have 
liked to keep all Spain. 

We had to go quite outside of the station grounds 
to get a cab for our hotel, but from this blow to our 
dignity I recovered a little later in the day, when the 
king, attended by as small a troop of cavalry as I sup- 
pose a king ever has with him, came driving by in the 
street where I was walking. As he sat in his open 
carriage he looked very amiable, and handsomer than 
most of the pictures make him. He seemed to be gaz- 
ing at me, and when he bowed I could do no less than 
return his salutation. As I glanced round to see if 
people near me were impressed by our exchange of 
civilities, I perceived an elderly officer next me. He 
was smiling as I was, and I think he was in the de- 
lusion that the king's bow, which I had so promptly 
returned, was intended for him. 



VIII 
COKDOVA AKD THE WAY THEEE 

I should be sorry if I could believe that Cordova 
experienced the disappointment in us, which I must 
own we felt in her; but our disappointment was un- 
questionable, and I will at once offer it to the reader 
as an inducement for him to go to Cordova with less 
lively expectations than ours. I would by no means 
have him stay away; after all, there is only one Cor- 
dova in the world which the capital of the Caliphate 
of the West once filled with her renown; and if the 
great mosque of Abderrahman is not so beautiful as 
one has been made to fancy it, still it is wonderful, and 
could not be missed without loss. 



Better, I should say, take the rapido which leaves 
Madrid three times a week at nine-thirty in the morn- 
ing, than the night express which leaves as often at the 
same hour in the evening. Since there are now such 
good day trains on the chief Spanish lines, it is flying 
in the face of Providence not to go by them ; they might 
be suddenly taken off; besides, they have excellent 
restaurant - cars, and there is, moreover, always the 
fascinating and often the memorable landscape which 
they pass through. By no fault of ours that I can 

165 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

remember, our train was rather crowded; that is, four 
or five out of the eight places in our corridor com- 
partment were taken, and we were afraid at every stop 
that more people would get in, though I do not know 
that it was our anxieties kept them out. For the matter 
of that, I do not know why I employed an interpreter 
at Madrid to get my ticket stamped at the ticket-office ; 
it required merely the presentation of the ticket at the 
window; but the interpreter seemed to wish it and it 
enabled him to practise his English with me, and I 
realized that he must live. In a peseta's worth of 
gratitude he followed us to our carriage, and he did 
not molest the mozo in putting our bags into the racks, 
though he hovered about the door till the train started ; 
and it just now occurs to me that he may have thought 
a peseta was not a sufficient return for his gratitude; 
he had rendered us no service. 

At Aranjuez the wheat-lands, which began to widen 
about us as soon as we got beyond the suburbs of 
Madrid, gave way to the groves and gardens of that 
really charming jDleasaunce, charming quite from the 
station, with grounds penetrated by placid waters over- 
hung by the English elms which the Castilians are so 
happy in having naturalized in their treeless waste. 
Multitudes of nightingales are said to sing among 
them, but it was not the season for hearing them from 
the train; and we made what shift we could with the 
strawberry and asparagus beds which we could see 
plainly, and the peach trees and cherry trees. One of 
these had committed the solecism of blossoming in 
October, instead of April or May, when the nobility 
came to their villas. 

We had often said during our stay in Madrid that 

we should certainly come for a day at Aranjuez ; and 

here we were, passing it with a five minutes' stop. I 

166 



CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

am sure it merited much more, not only for its many 
proud memories, but for its shameful ones, which are 
apt to be so much more lasting in the case of royal 
pleasaunces. The great Catholic King Ferdinand in- 
herited the place with, the Mastership of the Order of 
Santiago ; Charles V. used to come there for the shoot- 
ing, and Philip IL, Charleses III. and IV., and Ferdi- 
nand VII. built and rebuilt its edifices. Hut it is also 
memorable because the wretched Godoy fled there with 
the king, his friend, and the queen, his paramour, and 
there the pitiable king abdicated in favor of his abomi- 
nable son Ferdinand VII. It is the careful Murray 
who reminds me of this fact; Gautier, who apparently 
fails to get anything to his purpose out of Aranjuez, 
passes it with the remark that Godoy built there a 
gallery from his villa to the royal palace, for his easier 
access to the royal family in which he held a place so 
anomalous. From Mr. Martin Hume's Modem Spain 
I learn that when the court fled to Aranjuez from 
Madrid before the advance of Murat, and the mob, 
civil and military, hunted Godoy's villa through for 
him, he jumped out of bed and hid himself under a 
roll of matting, while the king and the queen, to save 
him, decreed his dismissal from all his offices and 
honors. 

But here just at the most interesting moment the 
successive bells and whistles are screeching, and the 
rapido is hurrying me away from Aranjuez. We are 
leaving a railway station, but presently it is as if we 
had set sail on a gray sea, with a long ground-swell 
such as we remembered from Old Castile. These in- 
numerable pastures and wheat-fields are in New Castile, 
and before long more distinctively they are in La 
Mancha, the country dear to fame as the home of Don 
Quixote. I must own at once it does not look it, or 

lft7 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

at least look like the country I had read out of his 
history in my boyhood. For the matter of that, no 
country ever looks like the country one reads out of a 
book, however real]y it may be that country. The 
trouble probably is that one carries out of one's reading 
an image which one had carried into it. When I read 
Don Quixote and read and read it again, I put La 
Mancha first into the map of southern Ohio, and then 
into that, after an interval of seven or eight years, of 
northern Ohio; and the scenes I arranged for his ad- 
ventures were landscapes composed from those about 
me in my earlier and later boyhood. There was then 
always something soft and mild in the Don Quixote 
country, with a blue river and gentle uplands, and 
woods where one cou]d rest in the shade, and hide one's 
self if one wished, after easily rescuing the oppressed, 
^ow, instead, a treeless plain unrolled itself from sky 
to sky, clean, dull, empty; and if some azure tops 
dimmed the clear line of the western horizon, how could 
I have got them into my early picture when I had 
never yet seen a mountain in my life? I could not 
put the knight and his squire on those naked levels 
where they should not have got a mile from home 
without discovery and arrest. I tried to think of them 
jogging along in talk of the adventures which the 
knight hoped for; but I could not make it work. I 
could have done better before we got so far from 
Aranjuez; there were gardens and orchards and a very 
suitable river there, and those elm trees overhanging 
it; but the prospect in La Mancha had only here and 
there a white-walled white farmhouse to vary its lonely 
simplicity, its desert fertility; and I could do nothing 
with the strips and patches of vineyard. It was all 
strangely African, strangely Mexican, and not at all 

American, not Ohioan, enough to be anything like the 

168 



COKDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

real La Mancha of my invention. To be sure, the doors 
and windows of the nearer houses were visibly netted 
against mosquitoes and that was something, but even 
that did not begin to be noticeable till we were drawing 
near the Sierra Morena. Then, so long before we 
reached the mighty chain of mountains which nature 
has stretched between the gravity of New Castile and 
the gaiety of Andalusia, as if they could not bear im- 
mediate contact, I experienced a moment of perfect 
reconciliation to the landscape as really wearing the 
face of that La Mancha familiar to my boyish vision. 
Late in the forenoon, but early enough to save the face 
of La Mancha, there appeared certain unquestionable 
shapes in the nearer and farther distance which I joy- 
ously knew for those windmills which Don Quixote 
had known for giants and spurred at, lance in rest. 
They were waving their vans in what he had found 
insolent defiance, but which seemed to us glad welcome, 
as of windmills waiting that long time for a reader 
of Cervantes who could enter into their feelings and 
into the friendly companionship they were offering. 



ir 



\Our train did not pass very near, but the distance 
was not bad for them; it kept them sixty or sixty-five 
years back in the past where they belonged, and in its 
dimness I could the more distinctly see Don Quixote 
careering against them, and Sancho Panza vainly warn- 
ing, vainly imploring him, and then in his rage and 
despair, " giving himself to the devil," as he had so 
often to do in that master's service; I do not know 
now that I would have gone nearer them if I could. 
Sometimes in the desolate plains where the windmills 

169 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

stood so well aloof men were lazily, or at least leisurely, 
plowing with their prehistoric crooked sticks. Here 
and there the clean levels were broken by shallow pools 
of water; and we were at first much tormented by 
expanses, almost as great as these pools, of a certain 
purple flower, which no curiosity of ours could prevail 
with to yield up the secret of its name or nature. It 
was one of the anomalies of this desert country that 
it was apparently prosperous, if one might guess from 
the comfortable-looking farmsteads scattered over it, 
inclosing house and stables in the courtyard framed by 
their white walls. The houses stood at no great dis- 
tances from one another, but were nowhere grouped in 
villages. There were commonly no towns near the 
stations, which were not always uncheerf ul ; sometimes 
there were flower-beds, unless my memory deceives me. 
Perhaps there would be a passenger or two, and cer- 
tainly a loafer or two, and always of the sex which in 
town life does the loafing; in the background or 
through the windows the other sex could be seen in 
its domestic activities. Only once did we see three 
girls of such as stay for the coming and going of trains 
the world over ; they waited arm in arm, and we were 
obliged to own they were plain, poor things. 

Their whitewash saves the distant towns from the 
effect of sinking into the earth, or irregularly rising 
from it, as in Old Castile, and the landscape cheered 
up more and more as we ran farther south. We passed 
through the country of the Valdepeiias wine, which it 
is said would so willingly be better than it is; there 
was even a station of that name, which looked much 
more of a station than most, and had, I think I re- 
member, buildings necessary to the wine industry about 
it. Murray, indeed, emboldens me in this halting con- 
jecture with the declaration that the neighboring town 

170 



COKDOVA AND THE WAY THEEE 

of Valdepefias is " completely undermined by wine- 
cellars of very ancient date " where the wine is " kept 
in caves in huge earthen jars," and when removed is 
put into goat or pig skins in the right Don Quixote 
fashion. 

\The whole region begins to reek of Cervantean mem- 
ories. Ten miles from the station of Argamasilla is 
the village where he imagined, and the inhabitants be- 
lieve, Don Quixote to have been born. Somewhere 
among these little towns Cervantes himself was thrown 
into prison for presuming to attempt collecting their 
rents when the people did not want to pay them. This 
is what I seem to remember having read, but heaven 
knows where, or if. What is certain is that almost 
before I was aware we were leaving the neighborhood 
of Valdepefias, where we saw men with donkeys gather- 
ing grapes and letting the donkeys browse on the vine 
leaves. Then we were mounting among the foothills 
of the Sierra Morena, not without much besetting 
trouble of mind because of those certain circles and 
squares of stone on the nearer and farther slopes which 
we have since somehow determined were sheep-folds. 
They abounded almost to the very scene of those capers 
which Don Quixote cut on the mountainside to testify 
his love for Dulcinea del Toboso, to the great scandal 
of Sancho Panza riding away to give his letter to the 
lady, but unable to bear the sight of the knight skipping 
on the rocks in a single garment. 



in 



In the forests about befell all those adventures with 
the mad Cardenio and the wronged Dorothea, both self- 
banished to the wilderness through the perfidy of the 
12 171 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

same false friend and faithless lover. The episodes 
which end so well, and which form, I think, the heart 
of the wonderful romance, have, from the car windows, 
the fittest possible setting; but suddenly the scene 
changes, and you are among aspects of nature as sav- 
agely wild as any in that new western land where the 
countrymen of Cervantes found a Xew Spain, just as 
the countrymen of Shakespeare found a Xew England. 
Suddenly, or if not suddenly, then startlingly, we were 
in a pass of the Sierra called (for some reason which 
I will leave picturesquely unexplained) the Precipice 
of Dogs, where bare sharp peaks and spears of rock 
started into the air, and the faces of the cliffs glared 
down upon us like the faces of Indian warriors painted 
yellow and orange and crimson, and every other war- 
like color. With my poor scruples of moderation I 
cannot give a just notion of the wild aspects; I must 
leave it to the reader, with the assurance that he can- 
not exaggerate it, while I employ myself in noting 
that already on this awful summit we began to feel 
ourselves in the south, in Andalusia. Along the moun- 
tain stream that slipped silverly away in the valley 
below, there were oleanders in bloom, such as we had 
left in Bermuda the April before. Already, north of 
the Sierra the country had been gentling. The up- 
turned soil had warmed from gray to red ; elsewhere 
the fields were green with sprouting wheat ; and there 
were wide spaces of those purple flowers, like crocuses, 
which women were gathering in large baskets. Prob- 
ably they were not crocuses; but there could be no 
doubt of the vineyards increasing in their acreage ; and 
the farmhouses which had been without windows in 
their outer walls, now sometimes opened as many as 
two to the passing train. Flocks of black sheep and 
goats, through the optical illusion frequent in the Span- 

172 



CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

ish air, looked large as cattle in the offing. Only in 
one place had we seen the tumbled boulders of Old 
Castile, and there had been really no greater objection 
to La Mancha than that it was flat, stale, and un- 
profitable and wholly unimaginable as the scene of 
even Don Quixote's first adventures. 
v But now that we had mounted to the station among 
the summits of the Sierra Morena, my fancy began to 
feel at home, and rested in a scene which did all the 
work for it. There was ample time for the fancy to 
rest in that more than co-operative landscape. Just 
beyond the first station the engine of a freight-train 
had opportunely left the track in front of us, and we 
waited there four hours till it could be got back. It 
would be inhuman to make the reader suffer through 
this delay with us after it ceased to be pleasure and 
began to be pain. Of course, everybody of foreign 
extraction got out of the train and many even went 
forward to look at the engine and see what they could 
do about it; others went partly forward and asked the 
bolder spirits on their way back what was the matter. 
Now and then our locomotive whistled as if to scare 
the wandering engine back to the rails. At moments 
the station-master gloomily returned to the station from 
somewhere and diligently despaired in front of it. 
Then we backed as if to let our locomotive run up 
the siding and try to butt the freight-train off the track 
to keep its engine company. 

About this time the restaurant-car bethought itself 
of some sort of late-afternoon repast, and we went for- 
ward and ate it with an interest which we prolonged 
as much as possible. We returned to our car which 
was now pervaded by an extremely bad smell. The 
smell drove us out, and we watched a public-spirited 

peasant beating the acorns from a live-oak near the 

173 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

station with a long pole. He brought a great many 
down, and first filled his sash-pocket with them ; then 
he distributed them among the children of the third- 
class passengers who left the train and nocked about 
him. But nobody seemed to do anything with the 
acorns, though they were more than an inch long, nar- 
row, and very sharp-pointed. As soon as he had dis- 
charged his self-assumed duty the peasant lay down 
on the sloping bank under the tree, and with his face 
in the grass, went to sleep for all our stay, and for what 
I know the whole night after. 

\It did not now seem likely that we should ever reach 
Cordova, though people made repeated expeditions to 
the front of the train, and came back reporting that in 
an hour we should start. We interested ourselves as 
intensely as possible in a family from the next compart- 
ment, London-tailored, and speaking either Spanish or 
English as they fancied, who we somehow understood 
lived at Barcelona; but nothing came of our interest. 
Then as the day waned we threw ourselves into the 
interest taken by a fellow-passenger in a young Spanish 
girl of thirteen or fourteen who had been in the care 
of a youngish middle-aged man when our train stopped, 
and been then abandoned by him for hours, while he 
seemed to be satisfying a vain curiosity at the head of 
the train. She owned that the deserter was her father, 
and while we were still poignantly concerned for her 
he came back and relieved the anxiety which the girl 
herself had apparently not shared even under pressure 
of the whole compartment's sympathy. 



rv 

The day waned more and more; the sun began to 
sink, and then it sank with that sudden drop which 

174 



COKDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

the sun has at last. The sky flushed crimson, turned 
mauve, turned gray, and the twilight thickened over 
the summits billowing softly westward. There had 
been a good deal of joking, both Spanish and English, 
among the passengers ; I had found particularly cheer- 
ing the richness of a certain machinist's trousers of 
bright golden corduroy; but as the shades of night 
began to embrown the scene our spirits fell; and at 
the cry of a lonesome bird, far off where the sunset had 
been, they followed the sun in its sudden drop. Against 
the horizon a peasant boy leaned on his staff and darkled 
against the darkening sky. 

Nothing lacked now but the opportune recollection 
that this was the region where the natives had been 
so wicked in times past that an ingenious statesman, 
such as have seldom been wanting to Spain, imagined 
bringing in a colony of German peasants to mix with 
them and reform them. That is what some of the 
books say, but others say that the region had remained 
unpeopled after the first exile of the conquered Moors. 
All hold that the notion of mixing the colonists and the 
natives worked the wrong way; the natives were not 
reformed, but the colonists were depraved and stood 
in with the local brigands, ultimately, if not immedi- 
ately. This is the view suggested, if not taken, by that 
amusing emissary, George Borrow, who seems in his 
Bible in Spain to have been equally employed in dis- 
tributing the truths of the New Testament and collect- 
ing material for the most dramatic study of Spanish 
civilization known to literature. It is a delightful 
book, and not least delightful in the moments of mis- 
giving which it imparts to the reader, when he does not 
know whether to prize more the author's observation or 
his invention, whichever it may be. Borrow reports 

a conversation with an innkeeper and his wife of the 

175 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

Colonial German descent, who gave a good enough 
account of themselves, and then adds the dark intima- 
tion of an Italian companion that they could not be 
honestly .keeping a hotel in that unfrequented place. 
It was not just in that place that our delay had chosen 
to occur, but it was in the same colonized region, and 
I am glad now that I had not remembered the incident 
from my first reading of Borrow. It was sufficiently 
uncomfortable to have some vague association with the 
failure of that excellent statesman's plan, blending 
creepily with the feeling of desolation from the gather- 
ing dark, and I now recall the distinct relief given 
by the unexpected appearance of two such Guardias 
Civiles as travel with every Spanish train, in the space 
before our lonely station. 

These admirable friends were part of the system 
which has made travel as safe throughout Spain as it 
is in Connecticut, where indeed I sometimes wonder 
that road-agents do not stop my Boston express in the 
waste expanse of those certain sand barrens just beyond 
New Haven. The last time I came through that desert 
I could not help thinking how nice it would be to have 
two Guardias Civiles in our Pullman car; but of 
course at the summit of the Sierra Morena, where our 
rapido was stalled in the deepening twilight, it was 
still nicer to see that soldier pair, pacing up and down, 
trim, straight, very gentle and polite-looking, but firm, 
with their rifles lying on their shoulders which they 
kept exactly together. It is part of the system that 
they may use those rifles upon any evil-doer whom 
they discover in a deed of violence, acting at once as 
police, court of law, and executioners; and satisfying 
public curiosity by pinning to the offender's coat their 
official certificate that he was shot by such and such a 

civil guard for such and such a reason, and then notify- 

176 



CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

ing the nearest authorities. It is perhaps too positive, 
too peremptory, too precise; and the responsibility 
could not be intrusted to men who had not satisfied the 
government of their fitness by two years' service in the 
army without arrest for any offense, or even any ques- 
tion of misbehavior. But these conditions once satis- 
fied, and their temperament and character approved, 
they are intrusted with what seem plenary powers till 
they are retired for old age; then their sons may serve 
after them as Civil Guards with the same prospect of 
pensions in the end. I suppose they do not always 
travel first class, but once their silent, soldierly presence 
honored our compartment between stations; and once 
an officer of their corps conversed for long with a fel- 
low-passenger in that courteous ease and self-respect 
which is so Spanish between persons of all ranks. 
\It was not very long after the guards appeared so 
reassuringly before the station, when a series of warn- 
ing bells and whistles sounded, and our locomotive with 
an impatient scream began to tug at our train. We 
were really off, starting from Santa Elena at the very 
time when we ought to have been stopping at Cordova, 
with a good stretch of four hours still before us. As 
our fellow-travelers quitted us at one station and an- 
other we were finally left alone with the kindly-looking 
old man who had seemed interested in us from the first, 
and who now made some advances in broken English. 
Presently he told us in Spanish, to account for the 
English accent on which we complimented him, that 
he had two sons studying some manufacturing busi- 
ness in Manchester, where he had visited them, and 
acquired so much of our tongue as we had heard. He 
was very proud and glad to speak of his sons, and 
he valued us for our English and the strangeness which 

commends people to one another in travel. When he 

177 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

got out at a station obscured past identification by its 
flaring lamps, he would not suffer me to help him 
with his hand-baggage; while he deplored my offered 
civility, he reassured me by patting my back at parting. 
Yet I myself had to endure the kindness which he would 
not when we arrived at Cordova, where two young 
fellows, who had got in at a suburban station, helped 
me with our bags and bundles quite as if they had 
been two young Americans. 



Somewhere at a junction our train had been divided 
and our car, left the last of what remained, had bumped 
and threatened to beat itself to pieces during its re- 
maining run of fifteen miles. This, with our long 
retard at Santa Elena, and our opportune defense from 
the depraved descendants of the reforming German 
colonists by the Guardias Civiles, had given us a day 
of so much excitement that we were anxious to have it 
end tranquilly at midnight in the hotel which we had 
chosen from our Baedeker. I would not have any 
reader of mine choose it again from my experience of 
it, though it was helplessly rather wilfully bad ; cer- 
tainly the fault was not the hotel's that it seemed as 
far from the station as Cordova was from Madrid. It 
might, under the circumstances, have, been a merit in 
it to be undergoing a thorough overhauling of the 
furnishing and decoration of the rooms on the patio 
which had formed our ideal for a quiet night. !A. con- 
ventionally napkined waiter welcomed us from the stony 
street, and sent us up to our rooms with the young inter- 
preter who met us at the station, but was obscure as 

to their location. When we refused them because they 

178 



CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

were over that loud-echoing alley, the interpreter made 
himself still more our friend and called mandatorially 
down the speaking-tube that we wished interiores and 
would take nothing else, though he must have known 
that no such rooms were to be had. He even abetted 
us in visiting the rooms on the patio and satisfying 
ourselves that they were all dismantled; when the 
waiter brought up the hot soup which was the only 
hot thing in the house beside our tempers, he joined 
with that poor fellow in reconciling us to the inevitable. 
They declared that the people whom we heard uninter- 
ruptedly clattering and chattering by in the street be- 
low, and the occasional tempest of wheels and bells and 
hoofs that clashed up to us, would be the very last 
to pass through there that night, and they gave such 
good and sufficient reasons for their opinion that we 
yielded as we needs must. Of course, they were wrong ; 
and perhaps they even knew that they were wrong; 
but I think we were the only people in that neighbor- 
hood who got any sleep that night or the next. We 
slept the sleep of exhaustion, but I believe those Cor- 
dovese preferred waking outdoors to trying to sleep 
within. It was apparently their custom to walk and 
talk the night away in the streets, not our street alone, 
but all the other streets of Cordova ; the laughing which 
I heard may have expressed the popular despair of get- 
ting any sleep. The next day we experimented in 
listening from rooms offered us over another street, 
and then we remained measurably contented to bear 
the ills we had. This was after an exhaustive search 
for a better hotel had partly appeased us; but there 
remained in the Faseo del Gran Capitan one house 
unvisited which has ever since grown upon my belief 
as embracing every comfort and advantage lacking 

to our hotel. I suppose I am the stronger in this be- 

179 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

lief because when we came to it we had been so dis- 
appointed with the others that we had not the courage 
to go inside. Smell for smell, the interior of that hotel 
may have harbored a worse one than the odor of hen- 
house which pervaded ours, I hope from the materials 
for calcimining the rooms on the patio. 

By the time we returned we found a guide waiting 
for us, and we agreed with him for a day's service. He 
did not differ with other authorities as to the claims 
of Cordova on the tourist's interest. From being the 
most brilliant capital of the Western world in the time 
of the Caliphs it is now allowed by all the guides and 
guide-books and most of the travelers, to be one of the 
dullest of provincial towns. It is no longer the center 
of learning; and though it cannot help doing a large 
business in olives, with the orchards covering the 
hills around it, the business does not seem to be a 
very active one. " The city once the abode of the 
flower of Andalusian nobility," says the intelligent 
O'Shea in his Guide to Spain, " is inhabited chiefly by 
administradores of the absentee sefiorio ; their ( solares ' 
are desert and wretched, the streets ill paved though 
clean, and the whitewashed houses unimportant, low, 
and denuded of all art and meaning, either past or 
present." Baedeker gives like reasons for thinking 
" the traveler whose expectation is on tiptoe as he 
enters the ancient capital of the Moors will probably 
be disappointed in all but the cathedral." Cook's 
Guide, latest but not least commendable of the au- 
thorities, is of a more divided mind and finds the means 
of trade and industry and their total want of visible 
employment at the worst anomalous. 

Vacant, narrow streets where the grass does not grow, 
and there is only an endless going and coming of aim- 
less feet; a market without buyers or sellers to speak 

180 



COKDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

of, and a tangle of squat white Louses, abounding in 
lovely patios, sweet and bright with flowers and foun- 
tains : this seems to be Cordova in the consensus of the 
manuals, and with me in the retrospect a sort of puzzle 
is the ultimate suggestion of the dead capital of the 
Western Caliphs. Gautier thinks, or seventy-two years 
ago he thought (and there has not been much change 
since), that " Cordova has a more African look than any 
other city of Andalusia; its streets, or rather its lanes, 
whose tumultuous pavement resembles the bed of dry 
torrents, all littered with straw from the loads of pass- 
ing donkeys, have nothing that recalls the manners and 
customs of Europe. The Moors, if they came back, 
would have no great trouble to reinstate themselves. 
. . . The universal use of lime-wash gives a uniform 
tint to the monuments, blunts the lines of the archi- 
tecture, effaces the ornamentation, and forbids you to 
read their age. . . . You cannot know the wall of a 
century ago from the wall of yesterday. Cordova, once 
the center of Arab civilization, is now a huddle of little 
white houses with corridors between them where two 
mules could hardly pass abreast. Life seems to have 
ebbed from the vast body, once animated by the active 
circulation of Moorish blood; nothing is left now but 
the blanched and calcined skeleton. ... In spite of 
its Moslem air, Cordova i3 very Christian and rests 
under the special protection of the Archangel Raphael." i 
It is all rather contradictory; but Gautier owns that 
the great mosque is a " monument unique in the world, 
and novel even for travelers who have had the fortune 
to admire the wonders of Moorish architecture at Gra- 
nada or Seville." 

De Amicis, who visited Cordova nearly forty-five 
years later, and in the heart of spring, brought letters 

which opened something of the intimate life of that 

181 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

apparently blanched and calcined skeleton. lie meets 
young men and matches Italian verses with their Span- 
ish ; spends whole nights sitting in their cafes or walk- 
ing their plazas, and comes away with his mouth full 
of the rapturous verses of an Arab poet : " Adieu, 
Cordova ! Would that my life were as long as Xoah's, 
that I might live forever within thy walls! Would 
that I had the treasures of Pharaoh, to spend them upon 
wine and the beautiful women of Cordova, with the 
gentle eyes that invite kisses !" He allows that the 
lines may be " a little too tropical for the taste of a 
European," and it seems to me that there may be a 
golden mean between scolding and flattering which 
would give the truth about Cordova. I do not promise 
to strike it; our hotel still rankles in my heart; but 
I promise to try for it, though I have to say that the 
very moment we started for the famous mosque it 
began to rain, and rained throughout the forenoon, 
while we weltered from wonder to wonder through the 
town. We were indeed weltering in a closed carriage, 
which found its way not so badly through the alleys 
where two mules could not pass abreast. The lime-wash 
of the walls did not emit the white heat in which the 
other tourists have basked or baked ; the houses looked 
wet and chill, and if they had those flowered and foun- 
tained patios which people talk of they had taken them 
in out of the rain. 

vr 

At the mosque the patio was not taken in only be- 
cause it was so large, but I find by our records that 
it was much molested by a beggar who followed us 
when we dismounted at the gate of the Court of 
Oranges, and all but took our minds off the famous 

182 



CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

Moorish fountain in the midst. It was not a fountain 
of the plashing or gushing sort, hut a noble great pool 
in a marble basin. The women who clustered about it 
were not laughing and chattering, or singing, or even 
dancing, in the right Andalusian fashion, but stood 
silent in statuesque poses from which they seemed in 
no haste to stir for filling their water jars and jugs. 
The Moorish tradition of irrigation confronting one in 
all the travels and histories as a supreme agricultural 
advantage which the Arabs took back to Africa with 
them, leaving Spain to thirst and fry, lingers here in 
the circles sunk round the orange trees and fed by little 
channels. The trees grew about as the fancy took them, 
and did not mind the incongruous palms towering as 
irregularly above them. While we wandered toward 
the mosque a woman robed in white cotton, with a 
lavender scarf crossing her breast, came in as irrelevant- 
ly as the orange trees and stood as stably as the palms ; 
in her night-black hair she alone in Cordova redeemed 
the pledge of beauty made for all Andalusian women 
by the reckless poets and romancers, whether in ballads 
or books of travel. 

One enters the court by a gate in a richly yellow 
tower, with a shrine to St. Michael over the door, and 
still higher at the lodging of the keeper a bed of bright 
flowers. Then, however, one is confronted with the 
first great disappointment in the mosque. Shall it be 
whispered in awe-stricken undertone that the impres- 
sion of a bull-ring is what lingers in the memory of 
the honest sight-seer from his first glance at the edifice ? 
The effect is heightened by the filling of the arcades 
which encircle it, and which now confront the eye with 
a rounded wall, where the Saracenic horseshoe remains 
distinct, but the space of yellow masonry below seems 

to forbid the outsider stealing knowledge of the spcc- 

183 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

tacle inside. The spectacle is of course no feast of 
bulls (as the Spanish euphemism has it), but the first 
amphitheatrical impression is not wholly dispersed by 
the sight of the interior. In order that the reader at 
his distance may figure this, he must imagine an in- 
definite cavernous expanse, with a low roof supported 
in vaulted arches by some thousand marble pillars, each 
with a different capital. There used to be perhaps 
half a thousand more pillars, and Charles V. made the 
Oordovese his reproaches for destroying the wonder of 
them when they planted their proud cathedral in the 
heart of the mosque. He held it a sort of sacrilege, 
but I think the honest traveler will say that there are 
still enough of those rather stumpy white marble 
columns left, and enough of those arches, striped in 
red and white with their undeniable suggestion of 
calico awnings. It is like a grotto gaudily but dingily 
decorated, or a vast circus-tent curtained off in hangings 
of those colors. 

One sees the sanctuary where the great Caliph said 
his prayers, and the Koran written by Othman and 
stained with his blood was kept; but I know at least 
one traveler who saw it without sentiment or any sort 
of reverent emotion, though he had not the authority 
of the " old rancid Christianity " of a Castilian for 
withholding his homage. If people would be as sincere 
as other people would like them to be, I think no one 
would profess regret for the Arab civilization in the 
presence of its monuments. Those Moors were of a 
religion which revolts all the finer instincts and lifts 
the soul with no generous hopes ; and the records of it 
have no appeal save to the love of mere beautiful 
decoration. Even here it mostly fails, to my thinking, 
and I say that for my part I found nothing so grand 

in the great mosaue of Cordova as the cathedral which 

184 










THE BELL-TOWER OF THE GREAT MOSQUE. CORDOVA 



CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

rises in the heart of it. If Abderrahman boasted that 
he would rear a shrine to the joy of earthly life and 
the hope of an earthly heaven, in the place of the 
Christian temple which he would throw down, I should 
like to overhear what his disembodied spirit would 
have to say to the saint whose shrine he demolished. 
I think the saint would have the better of him in any 
contention for their respective faiths, and could easily 
convince the impartial witness that his religion then 
abiding in medieval gloom was of promise for the 
future which Islam can never be. Yet it cannot be 
denied that when Abderraham built his mosque the 
Arabs of Cordova were a finer and wiser people than 
the Christians who dwelt in intellectual darkness among 
them, with an ideal of gloom and self-denial and a zeal 
for aimless martyrdom which must have been very hard 
for a gentleman and scholar to bear. Gentlemen and 
scholars were what the Arabs of the Western Caliphate 
seem to have become, with a primacy in medicine and 
mathematics beyond the learning of all other Europe 
in their day. They were tolerant skeptics in matters 
of religion; polite agnostics, who disliked extremely 
the passion of some Christians dwelling among them 
for getting themselves put to death, as they did, for 
insulting the popularly accepted Mohammedan creed. 
Probably people of culture in Cordova were quite of 
Abderrahman's mind in wishing to substitute the temple 
of a cheerfuler ideal for the shrine of the medieval 
Christianity which he destroyed; though they might 
have had their reserves as to the taste in which his 
mosque was completed. If they recognized it as a 
concession to the general preference, they could do so 
without the discomfort which they must have suffered 
when some new horde of Berbers, full of faith and 

fight, came over from Africa to push back the encroach- 

185 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

ing Spanish frontier, and give the local Christians as 
much martyrdom as they wanted. 

It is all a conjecture based upon material witness no 
more substantial than that which the Latin domination 
left long centuries before the Arabs came to possess 
the land. The mosque from which you drive through 
the rain to the river is neither newer nor older looking 
than the beautiful Saracenic bridge over the Guadal- 
quivir which the Arabs themselves say was first built 
by the Romans in the time of Augustus; the Moorish 
mill by the thither shore might have ground the first 
wheat grown in Europe. It is intensely, immemorially 
African, flat-roofed, white-walled; the mules waiting 
outside in the wet might have been drooping there 
ever since the going down of the Flood, from which 
the river could have got its muddy yellow. 

x If the reader will be advised by me he will not go 
to the Archaeological Museum, unless he wishes par- 
ticularly to contribute to the support of the custodian ; 
the collection will not repay him even for the time in 
which a whole day of Cordova will seem so super- 
abundant. Any little street will be worthier his study, 
with its type of passing girls in white and black man- 
tillas, and its shallow shops of all sorts, their fronts 
thrown open, and their interiors flung, as it were, on 
the sidewalk. It is said that the streets were the first 
to be paved in Europe, and they have apparently not 
been repaved since 8,50. This indeed will not hold 
quite true of that thoroughfare, twenty feet wide at 
least, which led from our hotel to the Paseo del Gran 
Capitan. In this were divers shops of the genteeler 
sort, and some large cafes, standing full of men of 
leisure, who crowded to their doors and windows, with* 
their hats on and their Hands in their pockets, as at a 
club, and let no fact of the passing world escape their 

186 



CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

hungry eyes. Their behavior expressed a famine of 
incident in Cordova which was pathetic. 



VII. 



\ The people did not look very healthy as to build or 
color, and there was a sound of coughing everywhere. 
To be sure, it was now the season of the first colds, 
which would no doubt wear off with the coming of next 
spring; and there was at any rate not nearly so much 
begging as at Toledo, because there could not be any- 
where. I am sorry I can contribute no statistics as 
to the moral or intellectual condition of Cordova; per- 
haps they will not be expected or desired of me; I 
can only say that the general intelligence is such that 
no one will own he does not know anything you ask 
him even when he does not; but this is a national 
rather than a local trait, which causes the stranger to 
go in many wrong directions all over the peninsula. I 
should not say that there was any noticeable decay of 
character from the north to the south such as the at- 
tributive pride of the old Castilian in the Sheridan 
Knowlesian drama would teach; the Cordovese looked 
no more shiftless than the haughtiest citizens of Burgos. 
They had decidedly prettier patios and more of them, 
and they had many public carriages against none what- 
ever in that ancient capital. Rubber tires I did not 
expect in Cordova and certainly did not get in a city 
where a single course over the pavements of 850 would 
have worn them to tatters : but there seems a good deal 
of public spirit if one may judge from the fact that 
it is the municipalitv which keeps Abdcrrahman's 
mosque in repair. There are public gardens, far 

pleasanter than those of Vail a do! id, which" we visited 
13 187 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

in an interval of the afternoon, and there is a very 
personable bull-ring to which we drove in the vain hope 
of seeing the people come out in a typical multitude. 
But there had been no feast of bulls; and we had to 
make what we could out of the walking and driving 
in the Paseo del Gran Capitan toward evening. In 
its long, discouraging course there were some good 
houses, but not many, and the promenaders of any 
social quality were almost as few. Some ladies in 
private carriages were driving out, and a great many 
more in public ones as well dressed as the others, but 
with no pretense of state in the horses or drivers. The 
women of the people all wore flowers in their hair, a 
dahlia or a marigold, whether their hair was black 
or gray. No ladies were walking in the Paseo, except 
one pretty mother, with her nice-looking children about 
her, who totaled the sum of her class ; but men of every 
class rather swarmed. High or low, they all wore the 
kind of hat which abounds everywhere in Andalusia 
and is called a Cordovese: flat, stiff, squat in crown 
and wide in brim, and of every shade of gray, brown, 
and black. 

I ought to have had my associations with the great 
Captain Gonsalvo in the promenade which the city 
has named after him, but I am not sure that I had, 
though his life was one of the Spanish books which 
I won my way through in the middle years of my 
pathless teens. A comprehensive ignorance of the coun- 
tries and histories which formed the setting of his 
most dramatic career was not the best preparation for 
knowledge of the man, but it was the best I had, and 
now I can only look back at my struggle with him and 
wonder that I came off alive. It is the hard fate of 
the self-taught that their learning must cost them twice 

as much labor as it would if they were taught by others ; 

188 



CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

the very books they study are grudging friends if not 
insidious foes. Long afterward when I came to Italy, 
and began to make the past part of my present, I be- 
gan to untangle a little the web that the French and 
the Aragonese wove in the conquest and reconquest of 
the wretched Sicilies; but how was I to imagine in 
the Connecticut Western Eeserve the scene of Gon- 
salvo's victories in Oalabria? Even loath Ferdinand 
the Catholic said they brought greater glory to his 
crown than his own conquest of Granada; I dare say 
I took some unintelligent pride in his being Viceroy 
of Naples, and I may have been indignant at his re- 
call and then his retirement from court by the jealous 
king. But my present knowledge of these facts, and 
of his helping put down the Moorish insurrection in 
1500, as well as his exploits as commander of a Spanish 
armada against the Turks is a recent debt I owe to 
the Encyclopedia Britannica and not to my boyish 
researches. Of like actuality is my debt to Mr. Cal- 
vert's Southern Spain, where he quotes the accounting 
which the Great Captain gave on the greedy king's 
demand for a statement of his expenses in the 
Sicilies. 

4J Two hundred thousand seven hundred and thirty- 
six ducats and 9 reals paid to the clergy and the poor 
who prayed for the victory of the army of Spain. 

" One hundred millions in pikes, bullets, and in- 
trenching tools ; 10,000 ducats in scented gloves, to pre- 
serve the troops from the odor of the enemies' dead 
left on the battle-field; 100,000 ducats, spent in the 
repair of the bells completely worn out by every-day 
announcing fresh victories gained over our enemies; 
50,000 ducats in ' aguardiente ' for the troops on the 
eve of battle. A million and a half for the safeguard- 
ing prisoners and wounded. 

189 



F AM ILIA It SPANISH TRAVELS 

" One million for Masses of Thanksgiving ; 700,494 
ducats for secret service, etc. 

" And one hundred millions for the patience with 
which I have listened to the king, who demands an 
account from the man who has presented him with a 
Kingdom." 

It seems that Gonsalvo was one of the greatest hu- 
morists, as well as captains of his age, and the king may 
very well have liked his fun no better than his fame. 
Now that he has been dead nearly four hundred years, 
Ferdinand would, if he were living, no doubt join 
Cordova in honoring Gonzalo Hernandez de Aguila 
y de Cordova. After all he was not born in Cordova 
(as I had supposed till an hour ago), but in the little 
city of Montilla, five stations away on the railroad to 
the Malaga, and now more noted for its surpassing 
sherry than for the greatest soldier of his time. To 
have given its name to Amontillado is glory enough 
for Montilla, and it must be owned that Gonzalo Her- 
nandez de Aguila y de Montilla would not sound so 
well as the title we know the hero by, when we know 
him at all. There may be some who will say that 
Cordova merits remembrance less because of him than 
because of Columbus, who first came to the Catholic 
kings there to offer them not a mere kingdom, but a 
whole hemisphere. Cordova was then the Spanish head- 
quarters for the operations against Granada, and one 
reads of the fact with a luminous sense which one 
cannot have till one has seen Cordova. 



VIII 

After our visits to the mosque and the bridge and 
the museum there remained nothing of our forenoon, 

190 



CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

and we gave the whole of the earlier afternoon to an 
excursion which strangers are expected to make into the 
first climb of hills to the eastward of the city. The 
road which reaches the Huerto de los Arcos is rather 
smoother for driving than the streets of Cordova, but 
the rain had made it heavy, and we were glad of our 
good horses and their owner's mercy to them. He 
stopped so often to breathe them wdien the ascent began 
that we had abundant time to note the features of the 
wayside; the many villas, piously named for saints, 
set on the incline, and orchard ed about with orange 
trees, in the beginning of that measureless forest of 
olives which has no limit but the horizon. 

From the gate to the villa which we had come to see 
it was a stiff ascent by terraced beds of roses, zinneas, 
and purple salvia beside walls heavy with jasmine and 
trumpet creepers, in full bloom, and orange trees, fruit- 
ing and flowering in their desultory way. Before the 
villa we were to see a fountain much favored by our 
guide who had a passion for the jets that played ball 
with themselves as long as the gardener let him turn 
the water on, and watched with joy to see how high 
the balls would go before slipping back. The fountain 
was in a grotto-like nook, where benches of cement 
decked with scallop shells were set round a basin with 
the figures of two small boys in it bestriding that of a 
lamb, all employed in letting the water dribble from 
their mouths. It was very simple-hearted, as such 
things seem mostly obliged to be, but nature helped 
art out so well with a lovely abundance of leaf and 
petal that a far more exacting taste than ours must 
have been satisfied. The garden was in fact very pretty, 
though whether it was worth fifteen pesetas and three 
hours coming to see the reader must decide for himself 

when he does it. I think it was, mvself, and I would 

191 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

like to be there now, sitting in a shell-covered cement 
chair at the villa steps, and letting the landscape un- 
roll itself wonderfully before me. We were on a shore 
of that ocean of olives which in southern Spain washes 
far up the mountain walls of the blue and bluer dis- 
tances, and which we were to skirt more and more in 
bay and inlet and widening and narrowing expanses 
throughout Andalusia. Before we left it we wearied 
utterly of it, and in fact the olive of Spain is not the 
sympathetic olive of Italy, though I should think it 
a much more practical and profitable tree. It is not 
planted so much at haphazard as the Italian olive seems 
to be ; its mass looks less like an old apple orchard than 
the Italian; its regular succession is a march of trim 
files as far as the horizon or the hillsides, which they 
often climbed to the top. We were in the season of 
the olive harvest, and throughout the month of October 
its nearer lines showed the sturdy trees weighed down 
by the dense fruit, sometimes very small, sometimes as 
large as pigeon eggs. There were vineyards and wheat- 
fields in that vast prospect, and certainly there were 
towns and villages; but what remains with me is the 
sense of olives and ever more olives, though this may 
be the cumulative effect of other such prospects as vast 
and as monotonous. 

While we looked away and away, the gardener and 
a half-grown boy were about their labors that Sunday 
afternoon as if it were a week-day, though for that 
reason perhaps they were not working very hard. They 
seemed mostly to be sweeping up the fallen leaves from 
the paths, and where the leaves had not fallen from 
the horse-chestnuts the boy was assisting nature by 
climbing the trees and plucking them. We tried to 
find out why he was doing this, but to this day I do 

not know why he was doing it, and I must be content 

192 






CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

to contribute the bare fact to the science of arboricul- 
ture. Possibly it was in the interest of neatness, and 
was a precaution against letting the leaves drop and 
litter the grass. There was apparently a passion for 
neatness throughout, which in the villa itself mounted 
to ecstasy. It was in a state to be come and lived in 
at any moment, though I believe it was occupied only 
in the late spring and the early autumn; in winter 
the noble family went to Madrid, and in summer to 
some northern watering-place. It was rather small, 
and expressed a life of the minor hospitalities when 
the family was in residence. It was no place for house- 
parties, and scarcely for week-end visits, or even for 
neighborhood dinners. Perhaps on that terrace there 
was afternoon ice-cream or chocolate for friends who 
rode or drove over or out; it seemed so possible that 
we had to check in ourselves the cozy impulse to pull 
up our shell-covered cement chairs to some central 
table of like composition. 

\ Within, the villa was of a spick-and-spanness which 
I feel that I have not adequately suggested; and may 
I say that the spray of a garden-hose seemed all that 
would be needed to put the place in readiness for 
occupation ? Not that even this was needed for that 
interior of tile and marble, so absolutely apt for the 
climate and the use the place would be put to. In 
vain we conjectured, and I hope not impertinently, the 
characters and tastes of the absentees; the sole clue 
that offered itself was a bookshelf of some Spanish 
versions from authors scientific and metaphysical to the 
verge of agnosticism. I would not swear to Huxley 
and Herbert Spencer among the English writers, but 
they were such as these, not in their entire bulk, but 
in extracts and special essays. I recall the slightly 

tilted row of the neat paper copies ; and I wish I knew 

193 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

who it was liked to read them. The Spanish have a 
fondness for such dangerous ground ; from some of 
their novels it appears they feel it rather chic to venture 
on it. 



IX 

We came away from Cordova with a pretty good 
conscience as to its sights. Upon the whole we were 
glad they were so few, when once we had made up 
our minds about the mosque. But now I have found 
too late that we ought to have visited the general market 
in the old square where the tournaments used to take 
place; we ought to have seen also the Chapel of the 
Hospital del Cardenal, because it was part of the 
mosque of Al-Manssour; we ought to have verified 
the remains of two baths out of the nine hundred once 
existing in the Calle del Bagno Alta ; and we ought 
finally to have visited the remnant of a Moorish house 
in the Plazuela de San Nicolas, with its gallery of 
jasper columns, now unhappily whitewashed. The 
Campo Santo has an unsatisfied claim upon my inter- 
est because it was the place where the perfervid Chris- 
tian zealots used to find the martyrdom they sought 
at the hands of the unwilling Arabs; and where, far 
earlier, Julius Cresar planted a plane tree after his 
victory over the forces of Pompeii at Munda. The 
tree no longer exists, but neither does Caesar, or the 
thirty thousand enemies whom he slew there, or the 
sons of Pompeii who commanded them. These were 
so near beating Caesar at first that he ran among his 
soldiers " asking them whether they were not ashamed 
to deliver him into the hands of boys." One of the 
boys escaped, but two days after the fight the head 

of the elder was brought to Ca?sar, who was not liked 

194 



CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE 

for the triumph he made himself after the event in 
Rome, where it was thought out of taste to rejoice 
over the calamity of his fellow-countrymen as if they 
had been foreign foes; the Romans do not seem to 
have minded his putting twenty-eight thousand Cor- 
dovese to death for their Pompeian politics. If I had 
remembered all this from my Plutarch, I should cer- 
tainly have gone to see the place where Caesar planted 
that plane tree, Perhaps some kind soul will go to 
see it for me. I myself do not expect to return to 
Cordova. 



IX 

FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

Cordova seemed to cheer up as much as we at our 
going. We had undoubtedly had the better night's 
sleep; as often as we woke we found Cordova awake, 
walking and talking, and coughing more than the night 
before, probably from fresh colds taken in the rain. 
From time to time there were church-bells, variously 
like tin pans and iron pots in tone, without sonorousness 
in their noise, or such wild clangor as some Italian 
church-bells have. But Cordova had lived through it, 
and at the station was lively with the arriving and de- 
parting trains. The morning was not only bright; it 
was hot, and the place babbled with many voices. We 
thought one voice crying " Agua, agua !" was a parrot's 
and then we thought it was a girl's, but really it was a 
boy with wfater for sale in a stone bottle. He had not 
a rose, white or red, in his hair, but if he had been a 
girl, old or young, he would have had one, white or red. 
Some of the elder women wore mantillas, but these wore 
flowers too, and were less pleasing than pathetic for it ; 
one very massive matron was less pleasing and more 
pathetic than the rest. Peasant women carried bunches 
of chickens by the legs, and one had a turkey in a rush 
bag with a narrow neck to put its head out of for its 
greater convenience in gobbling. At the door of the 
station a donkey tried to bite a fly on its back ; but even 
a Spanish donkey cannot do everything. There was 

196 



FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

no attempt to cheat us in the weight of our trunks, 
as there often is in Italy, and the mozo who put us 
and our hand-bags into the train was content with 
his reasonable fee. As for the pair of Civil Guards 
who were to go with us, they were of an insurpass- 
able beauty and propriety, and we felt it a peculiar 
honor when one of them got into the compartment 
beside ours. 

\We were to take the mail-train to Seville; and in 
Spain the correo is next to the Sud-Express, which is 
the last word in the vocabulary of Peninsular railroad- 
ing. Our correo had been up all night on the way from 
Madrid, and our compartment had apparently been 
used as a bedchamber, with moments of supper-room. 
It seemed to have been occupied by a whole family; 
there were frowsy pillows crushed into the corners of 
the seats, and, though a porter caught these away, the 
cigar stubs, and the cigarette ashes strewing the rug 
and fixed in it with various liquids, as well as some 
scattering hair-pins, escaped his care. But when it 
was dried and aired out by windows opened to the 
sunny weather, it was by no means a bad compartment. 
The broad cushions were certainly cleaner than the 
carpet; and it was something — it was a great deal — 
to be getting out of Cordova on any terms. 'Not that 
Cordova seems at this distance so bad as it seemed on 
the ground. If we could have had the bright Monday 
of our departure instead of the rainy Sunday of our 
stay there we might have wished to stay longer. But 
as it was the four hours' run to Seville was delightful, 
largely because it Was the run from Cordova. 

We were running at once over a gentle ground-swell 
which rose and sank in larger billows now and then, 
and the yellow Guadalquivir followed us all the way, 
in a valley that sometimes widened to the blue moun- 

197 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

tains always walling the horizon. We had first entered 
Andalusia after dark, and the scene had now a novelty 
little staled by the distant view of the afternoon before. 
The olive orchards then seen afar were intimately 
realized more and more in their amazing extent. Xone 
of the trees looked so old, so world-old, as certain trees 
in the careless olive groves of Italy. They were regu- 
larly planted, and most were in a vigorous middle life ; 
where they were old they were closely pollarded; and 
there were young trees, apparently newly set out; there 
were holes indefinitely waiting for others. These were 
often, throughout Andalusia, covered to their first fork 
with cones of earth; and we remained in the dramatic 
superstition that this was to protect them against the 
omnivorous hunger of the goats, till we were told that 
it was to save their roots from being loosened by the 
wind. The orchards filled the level foregrounds and 
the hilly backgrounds to the vanishing-points of the 
mountainous perspectives ; but when I say this I mean 
the reader to allow for wide expanses of pasturage, 
where lordly bulls were hoarding themselves for the 
feasts throughout Spain which the bulls of Andalusia 
are happy beyond others in supplying. With their de- 
voted families they paraded the meadows, black against 
the green, or stood in sharp arrest, the most character- 
istic accent of the scene. Tn the farther rather than 
the nearer distance there were towns, very white, very 
African, keeping jealously away from the stations, as 
the custom of most towns is in Spain, beyond the wheat- 
lands which disputed the landscape witK the olive 
orchards. 

One of these towns lay white at the base of a hill 
topped by a yellow Moorish castle against the blue sky, 
like a subject waiting for its painter and conscious of 

its wonderful adaptation to water-color. The railroad- 

198 



FIEST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

banks were hedged with Spanish bayonet, and in places 
with cactus grown into trees, all knees and elbows, and 
of a diabolical uncouthness. The air was fresh and 
springlike, and under the bright sun, which we had al- 
ready felt hot, men were plowing the gray fields for 
wheat. Other men were beginning their noonday lunch, 
which, with the long nap to follow, would last till three 
o'clock, and perhaps be rashly accounted to them for 
sloth by the industrious tourist who did not know that 
their work had begun at dawn and would not end till 
dusk. Indolence may be a vice of the towns in Spain, 
but there is no loafing in the country, if I may believe 
the conclusions of my note-book. The fields often 
looked barren enough, and large spaces of their surface 
were covered by a sort of ground palm, as it seemed to 
be, though whether it was really a ground palm or not 
I know no more than I know the name or nature of 
the wild flower which looked an autumn crocus, and 
which with other wild flowers fringed the whole course 
of the train. There was especially a small yellow 
flower, star-shaped, which we afterward learned was 
called Todos Santos, from its custom of blooming at 
All Saints, and which washed the sward in the child- 
like enthusiasm of buttercups. A fine white narcissus 
abounded, and clumps of a mauve flower which swung 
its tiny bells over the sward washed by the Todos 
Santos. There were other flowers, which did what they 
could to brighten our way, all clinging to the notion 
of summer, which the weather continued to flatter 
throughout our fortnight in Seville. 

I could not honestly say that the stations or the 
people about them were more interesting than in La 
Mancha. But at one place, where some gentlemen in 
linen jackets dismounted with their guns, a group of 

men with dogs leashed in pairs and saddle-horses be- 

199 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

hind them, took me with the sense of something peculiar- 
ly native where everything was so native. They were 
slim, narrow-hipped young fellows, tight-jerkined, loose- 
trousered, with a sort of divided apron of leather facing 
the leg and coming to the ankle ; and all were of a most 
masterly Velasquez coloring and drawing. As they stood 
smoking motionlessly, letting the smoke drift from their 
nostrils, they seemed somehow of the same make with 
the slouching hounds, and they leaned forward together, 
giving the hunters no visible or audible greeting, but 
questioning their will with one quality of gaze. The 
hunters moved toward them, but not as if they belonged 
together, or expected any sort of demonstration from 
the men, dogs, and horses that were of course there 
to meet them. As long as our train paused, no electrify- 
ing spark kindled them to a show of emotion; but it 
would have been interesting to see what happened after 
we left them behind; they could not have kept their 
attitude of mutual indifference much longer. These 
peasants, like the Spaniards everywhere, were of an 
intelligent and sagacious look; they only wanted a 
chance, one must think, to be a leading race. They have 
sometimes an anxiety of appeal in their apathy, as if 
they would like to know more than they do. 

There was some livelier thronging at the station 
where the train stopped for luncheon, but secure with 
the pretty rush-basket which the head waiter at our 
hotel, so much better than the hotel, had furnished us 
at starting, we kept to our car ; and there presently we 
were joined by a young couple who were unmistakably 
a new married couple. The man was of a rich brown, 
and the woman of a dead white with dead black hair. 
They both might have been better-looking than they 
were, but apparently not better otherwise, for at Seville 

the groom helped us out of the car with our hand-bags. 

200 



FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

I do not know what polite offers from him had already 
brought out the thanks in which our speech bewrayed 
us; but at our outlandish accents they at once became 
easier. They became frankly at home with themselves, 
and talked in their Andalusian patter with no fear of 
being understood. I might, indeed, have been far apter 
in Spanish without understanding their talk, for when 
printed the Andalusian dialect varies as far from the 
Castilian as, say, the Venetian varies from the Tuscan, 
and when spoken, more. It may then be reduced al- 
most wholly to vowel sounds, and from the lips of some 
speakers it is really no more consonantal than if it came 
from the beaks of birds. They do not lisp the soft c or 
the Zj as the Castilians do, but hiss them, and lisp the s 
instead, as the reader will find amusingly noted in the Se- 
villian chapters of The Sister of San Sulpice, which are 
the most charming chapters of that most charming novel. 
\ At the stations there were sometimes girls and some- 
times boys with water for sale from stone bottles, who 
walked by the cars crying it; and there were bits of 
bright garden, or there were flowers in pots. There 
were also poor little human flowers, or call them weeds, 
if you will, that suddenly sprang up beside our win- 
dows, and moved their petals in pitiful prayer for 
alms. They always sprang up on the off side of the 
train, so that the trainmen could not see them, but I 
hope no trainman in Spain would have had the heart to 
molest them. As a matter of taste in vegetation, how- 
ever, we preferred an occasional effect of mixed orange 
and pomegranate trees, with their perennial green and 
their autumnal red. We were, in fact, so spoiled by 
the profusion of these little human flowers, or weeds, 
that we even liked the change to the dried stalk of an 
old man, flowering at top into a flat basket of pale- 
pink shrimps. He gave us our first sight of sea-fruit, 

201 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

when we had got, without knowing it, to Seville Junc- 
tion. There was, oddly enough, no other fruit for sale 
there; but there was a very agreeable-looking booth at 
the end of the platform placarded with signs of Puerto 
Rico coffee, cognac, and other drinks; and outside of 
it there were wash-basins and clean towels. I do not 
know how an old woman with a blind daughter made 
herself effective in the crowd, which did not seem much 
preoccupied with the opportunities of ablution and re- 
fection at that booth ; but perhaps she begged with her 
blind daughter's help while the crowd was busy in 
assorting itself for Cadiz and Seville and Malaga and 
Cordova and other musically syllabled mothers of his- 
tory and romance. 



ii 



A few miles and a few minutes more and we were 
in the embrace of the loveliest of them, which was at 
first the clutch on the octroi. But the octroi at Seville 
is not serious, and a walrus-mustached old porter, who 
looked like an old American car-driver of the bearded 
eighteen-sixties, eased us — not very swiftly, but softly 
■ — through the local customs, and then we drove neither 
so swiftly nor so softly to the hotel, where we had de- 
cided we would have rooms on the patio. We had still 
to learn that if there is a patio in a Spanish hotel you 
cannot have rooms in it, because they are either in re- 
pair or they are occupied. In the present case they 
were occupied ; but we could have rooms over the street, 
which were the same as in the patio, and which were 
perfectly quiet, as we could perceive from the trolley- 
cars grinding and squealing under their windows. The 
manager (if that was the quality of the patient and 

amiable old official who received us) seemed surprised 

202 






FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

to see the cars there, perhaps because they were so in- 
audible ; but he said we could have rooms in the annex, 
fronting on the adjoining plaza and siding on an in- 
offensive avenue where there were absolutely no cars. 
The interior, climbing to a lofty roof by a succession of 
galleries, was hushed by four silent sefioras, all in black, 
and seated in mute ceremony around a table in chairs 
from which their little feet scarcely touched the marble 
pavement. Their quiet confirmed the manager's as- 
surance of a pervading tranquillity, and though the 
only bath in the annex was confessedly on the ground 
floor, and we were to be two floors above, the affair 
was very simple: the chambermaid would always show 
us where the bath was. 

v With misgiving, lost in a sense of our helplessness, 
we tried to think that the avenue under us was then 
quieting down with the waning day; and certainly it 
was not so noisy as the plaza, which resounded with the 
whips and quips of the cabmen, and gave no signs of 
quiescence. Otherwise the annex was very pleasant, 
and we took the rooms shown us, hoping the best and 
fearing the worst. Our fears were wiser than our 
hopes, but we did not know this, and we went as gaily 
as we could for tea in the patio of our hotel, where 
a fountain typically trickled amidst its water-plants 
and a noiseless Englishman at his separate table al- 
most restored our lost faith in a world not wholly 
racket. A young Spaniard and two young Spanish 
girls helped out the illusion with their gentle move- 
ments and their muted gutturals, and we looked for- 
ward to dinner with fond expectation. To tell the 
truth, the dinner, when we came back to it, was not 
very good, or at least not very winning, and the next 
night it was no better, though the head waiter had 
then made us so much favor with himself as to promise 
14 203 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

us a side-table for the rest of our stay. He was a very 
friendly head waiter, and the dining-room was a long 
glare of the encaustic tiling which all Seville seems 
lined with, and of every Moorish motive in the decora- 
tion. Besides, there was a young Scotch girl, very inter- 
estingly pale and delicate of face, at one of the tables, 
and at another a Spanish girl with the most wonderful 
fire-red hair, and there were several miracles of the 
beautiful obesity Avhich abounds in Spain. 

When we returned, to the annex it did seem, for the 
short time we kept our windows shut, that the man- 
ager had spoken true, and we promised ourselves a 
tranquil night, which, after our two nights in Cordova, 
we needed if we did not merit. But we had counted 
without the spread of popular education in Spain. 
Under our windows, just across the way, there proved 
to be a school of the " Koyal Society of Friends of 
their Country," as the Spanish inscription in its front 
proclaimed ; and at dusk its pupils, children and young 
people of both sexes, began clamoring for knowledge at 
its doors. About ten o'clock they burst from them 
again with joyous exultation in their acquirements; 
then, shortly after, every manner of vehicle began to 
pass, especially heavy market wagons overladen and 
drawn by horses swarming with bells. Their succession 
left scarcely a moment of the night unstunned; but if 
ever a moment seemed to be escaping, there was a 
maniacal bell in a church near by that clashed out: 
" Hello ! Here's a bit of silence ; let's knock it on the 
head!" 

\We went promptly the next day to the gentle old 
manager and told him that he had been deceived in 
thinking he had given us rooms on a quiet street, and 
appealed to his invention for something, for anything, 
different. His invention had probably never been put 

204 



FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

to such stress before, and he showed us an excess of 
impossible apartments, which we subjected to a con- 
sideration worthy of the greatest promise in them. Our 
search ended in a suite of rooms on the top floor, where 
we could have the range of a flat roof outside if we 
wanted; but as the private family living next door 
kept hens, led by a lordly turkey, on their roof, we 
were sorrowfully forced to forego our peculiar advan- 
tage. Peculiar we then thought it, though we learned 
afterward that poultry-farming was not uncommon on 
the flat roofs of Seville, and there is now no telling how 
we might have prospered if we had taken those rooms 
and stocked our roof with Plymouth Rocks and Wyan- 
dottes. At the moment, however, we thought it would 
not do, and we could only offer our excuses to the 
manager, whose resources we had now exhausted, but 
not whose patience, and we parted with expressions of 
mutual esteem and regret. 

Our own grief was sincerer in leaving behind us the 
enthusiastic chambermaid of the annex who had greeted 
us with glad service, and was so hopeful that when 
she said our doors should be made to latch and lock in 
the morning, it was as if they latched and locked al- 
ready. Her zeal made the hot water she brought for 
the baths really hot, ft Caliente, caliente" and her voice 
would have quieted the street under our windows if 
music could have soothed it. At a friendly word she 
grew trustful, and told us how it was hard, hard for 
poor people in Seville; how she had three dollars a 
month and her husband four ; and how they had to toil 
for it. When we could not help telling her, cruelly 
enough, what they singly and jointly earn in New York, 
she praised rather than coveted the happier chance im- 
possible to them. They would like to go, but they could 

not go ! She was gay with it all, and after we had left 

205 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

the hotel and come back for the shawl which had been 
forgotten, she ran for it, shouting with laughter, as if 
we must see it the great joke she did ; and she took the 
reward offered with the self-respect never wanting to 
the Spanish poor. Very likely if I ransacked my mem- 
ory I might find instances of their abusing those ad- 
vantages over the stranger which Providence puts in 
the reach of the native everywhere; but on the spur 
of the moment, I do not recall any. In Spain, where 
a woman earns three dollars a month, as in America 
where she earns thirty, the poor seem to abound in the 
comparative virtues which the rich demand in return 
for the chances of Heaven which they abandon to them. 
There were few of those rendering us service there 
whom we would not willingly have brought away with 
us ; but very likely we should have found they had the 
defects of their qualities. 

When we definitely turned our backs on the potential 
poultry-farm offered us at our hotel, we found ourselves 
in as good housing at another, overlooking the length 
and breadth of the stately Plaza San Fernando, with 
its parallelogram of tall palms, under a full moon swim- 
ming in a cloudless heaven by night and by day. By 
day, of course, we did not see it, but the sun was visibly 
there, rather blazing hot, even in mid-October, and 
showing more distinctly than the moon the beautiful 
tower of the Giralda from the waist up, and the shoul- 
der of the great cathedral, besides features of other 
noble, though less noble, edifices. Our plaza was so 
full of romantic suggestion that I am rather glad now 
I had no association with it. I am sure T could not 
have borne at the time to know, as I have only now 
learned by recurring to my Eaedeker, that in the old 
Franciscan cloister once there had stood the equestrian 

statue of the Comendador who dismounts and comes 

206 



FIKST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

unbidden to the supper of Don Giovanni in the opera. 
That was a statue which, seen in my far youth, haunted 
my nightmares for many a year, and I am sure it would 
have kept me from sleep in the conditions, now so 
perfect, of our new housing if I had known about it. 



in 



The plaza is named, of course, for King Fernando, 
who took Seville from the Moors six hundred years 
ago, and was canonized for his conquests and his vir- 
tues. But I must not enter so rashly upon the history 
of Seville, or forget the arrears of personal impression 
which I have to bring up. The very drive from the 
station was full of impressions, from the narrow and 
crooked streets, the houses of yellow, blue, and pink 
stucco, the flowered and fountained patios glimpsed 
passingly, the half-lengths of church-towers, and the 
fleeting facades of convents and palaces, all lovely in 
the mild afternoon light. These impressions soon be- 
came confluent, so that without the constant witness of 
our note-books I should now find it impossible to sepa- 
rate them. If they could be imparted to the reader 
in their complexity, that would doubtless be the ideal, 
though he would not believe that their confused pat- 
tern was a true reflex of Seville; so I recur to the 
record, which says that the morning after our arrival 
we hurried to see the great and beautiful cathedral. It 
had failed, in our approach the afternoon before, to 
fulfil the promise of one of our half-dozen guide-books 
(T forget which one) that it would seem to gather 
Seville about it as a hen gathers her chickens, but its 
vastness grew upon us with every moment of our 
more intimate acquaintance. Our acquaintance quick- 

207 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

ly ripened into the affectionate friendship which be- 
came a tender regret when we looked our last upon 
it; and vast as it was, it was never too large for our 
embrace. I doubt if there was a moment in our fort- 
night's devotion when we thought the doughty canons, 
its brave-spoken founders, " mad to have undertaken it," 
as they said they expected people to think, or any 
moment when we did not revere them for imagining a 
temple at once so beautiful and so big. 

Our first visit was redeemed from the commonplace 
of our duty-round of the side-chapels by two things 
which I can remember without the help of my notes. 
One, and the great one, was Murillo's " Vision of St. 
Anthony," in which the painter has most surpassed him- 
self, and which not to have seen, Gautier says, is not to 
have known the painter. It is so glorious a masterpiece, 
with the Child joyously running down from the cluster- 
ing angels toward the kneeling saint in the nearest cor- 
ner of the foreground, that it was distinctly a moment 
before I realized that the saint had once been cut out 
of his corner and sent into an incredible exile in Amer- 
ica, and then munificently restored to it, though the 
seam in the canvas only too literally attested the in- 
cident. I could not well say how this fact then en- 
hanced the interest of the painting, and then how it 
ceased from the consciousness, which it must always 
recur to with any remembrance of it. If one could 
envy wealth its chance of doing a deed of absolute 
good, here was the occasion, and I used it. I did envy 
the mind, along with the money, to do that great 
thing. Another great thing which still more swelled my 
American heart and made it glow with patriotic pride 
was the monument to Columbus, which our suffering 
his dust to be translated from Havana has made pos- 
sible in Seville, There may be other noble results of 

208 



FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

our war on Spain for the suzerainty of Cuba and the 
conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, but there 
is none which matches in moral beauty the chance it 
won us for this Grand Consent. I suppose those effigies 
of the four Spanish realms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, 
and Navarre, which bear the coffin of the discoverer 
in stateliest processional on their shoulders, may be 
censured for being too boldly superb, too almost 
swagger, but I will not be the one to censure them. 
They are painted the color of life, and they advance 
colossally, royal-robed and mail-clad, as if marching to 
some proud music, and would tread you down if you 
did not stand aside. It is perhaps not art, but it is 
magnificent; nothing less stupendously Spanish would 
have sufficed; and I felt that the magnanimity which 
had yielded Spain this swelling opportunity had made 
America her equal in it. 

We went to the cathedral the first morning after 
our arrival in Seville, because we did not know how 
soon we might go away, and then we went every morn- 
ing or every afternoon of our fortnight there. Habitu- 
ally we entered by that Gate of Pardon which in former 
times had opened the sanctuary to any wickedness short 
of heresy ; but, as our need of refuge was not pressing, 
we wearied of the Gate of Pardon, with its beautiful 
Saracenic arch converted to Christianity by the Renais- 
sance bas-relief obliterating the texts from the Koran. 
We tried to form the habit of going in by other gates, 
but the Gate of Pardon finally prevailed; there was 
always a gantlet of cabmen to be run beside it, which 
brought our sins home to us. It led into the badly 
paved Court of Oranges, where the trees seem planted 
haphazard and where there used also to be fountains. 
Gate and court are remnants of the mosque, patterned 

upon that of Cordova by one of the proud Moorish kings 

209 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

of Seville, and burned by the Normans when they took 
and sacked his city. His mosque had displaced the 
early Christian basilica of San Vicente, which the still 
earlier temple to Venus Salambo had become. Then, 
after the mosque was rebuilt, the good San Fernando 
in his turn equipped it with a Gothic choir and chapels 
and turned it into the cathedral, which was worn out 
with pious uses when the present edifice was founded, 
in their folie des grandeurs, by those glorious madmen 
in the first year of the fifteenth century. 



IV 



Little of this learning troubled me in my visits to 
the cathedral, or even the fact that, next to St. Peter's, 
it was the largest church in the world. It was sufficient 
to itself by mere force of architectural presence, with- 
out the help of incidents or measurements. It was a 
city in itself, with a community of priests and sacris- 
tans dwelling in it, and a floating population of sight- 
seers and worshipers always passing through it. The 
first morning we had submitted to make the round 
of the chapels, patiently paying to have each of them 
unlocked and wearily wondering at their wonders, but 
only sympathizing really with the stern cleric who 
showed the ceremonial vestments and jewels of the 
cathedral, and whose bitter face expressed, or seemed 
to express, abhorrence of our whole trivial tourist tribe. 
After that morning we took our curiosity into our own 
keeping and looked at nothing that did not interest us, 
and we were interested most in those fellow-beings who 
kept coming and going all day long. 

Chiefly, of course, they were women. In Catholic 
countries women have either more sins to be forgiven 

210 




IN ATTITUDES OF SILENT DEVOTION 



FIEST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

than the men, or else they are sorrier for them; and 
here, whether there was service or not, they were 
dropped everywhere in veiled and motionless prayer. 
In Seville the law of the mantilla is rigorously enforced. 
If a woman drives, she may wear a hat; but if she 
walks, she must wear a mantilla under pain of being 
pointed at by the finger of scorn. If she is a young 
girl she may wear colors with it (a cheerful blue seems 
the favorite), but by far the greater number came to 
the cathedral in complete black. Those somber figures 
which clustered before chapel, or singly dotted the pave- 
ment everywhere, flitted in and out like shadows in the 
perpetual twilight. For far the greater number, their 
coming to the church was almost their sole escape into 
the world. They sometimes met friends, and after a 
moment, or an hour, of prayer they could cheer their 
hearts with neighborly gossip. But for the greater part 
they appeared and disappeared silently and swiftly, 
and left the spectator to helpless conjecture of their 
history. Many of them would have first met their 
husbands in the cathedral when they prayed, or when 
they began to look around to see who was looking at 
them. It might have been their trysting-place, safe- 
guarding them in their lovers' meetings, and after mar- 
riage it had become their social world, when their hus- 
bands left them for the clubs or the cafes. They could 
not go at night, of course, except to some special func- 
tion, but they could come by day as often as they liked. 
I do not suppose that the worshipers I saw habitually 
united love or friendship with their devotions in the 
cathedral, but some certainly joined business with de- 
votion; at a high function one day an American girl 
felt herself sharply nudged in the side, and when she 
turned she found the palm of her kneeling neighbor 
stretched toward her. They must all have had their 

211 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

parish churches besides the cathedral, and a devotee 
might make the day a social whirl by visiting one 
shrine after another. But I do not think that many 
do. The Spanish women are of a domestic genus, and 
are expected to keep at home by the men who expect 
to keep abroad. 

N I do not know just how it is in the parish churches ; 
they must each have its special rite, which draws and 
holds the frequenter ; but the cathedral constantly offers 
a drama of irresistible appeal. We non-Catholics can 
feel this even at the distance to which our Protestant- 
ism has remanded us, and at your first visit to the 
Seville cathedral during mass you cannot help a mo- 
ment of recreant regret when you wish that a part 
in the mystery enacting was your birthright. The 
esthetic emotion is not denied you ; the organ-tide that 
floods the place bears you on it, too; the priests per- 
form their rites before the altar for you; they come 
and go, they bow and kneel, for you ; the censer swings 
and smokes for you; the little wicked-eyed choir-boys 
and mischievous-looking acolytes suppress their natures 
in your behalf as much as if you were a believer, or 
perhaps more. The whole unstinted hospitality of the 
service is there for you, as well as for the children of 
the house, and the heart must be rude and the soul 
ungrateful that would refuse it. For my part, I ac- 
cepted it as far as I knew how, and when I left the 
worshipers on their knees and went tiptoeing from pic- 
ture to picture and chapel to chapel, it was with shame 
for the unscrupulous sacristan showing me about, and 
I felt that he, if not I, ought to be put out and not 
allowed back till the function was over. I call him 
sacristan at a venture; but there were several kinds of 
guides in the cathedral, some in the livery of the place 

and some in civil dress, willing to supplement our hotel 

212 



FIEST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

interpreter, or lying in wait for us when we came alone. 
I wish now I had taken them all, but at the time they 
tired me, and I denied them. 

N Though not a day passed but we saw it, I am not able 
to say what the cathedral was like. The choir was 
planted in the heart of it, as it might be a celestial 
refuge in that forest of mighty pillars, as great in 
girth as the giant redwoods of California, and climbing 
to a Gothic firmament horizoned round as with sunset 
light from near a hundred painted windows. The 
chapels on each side, the most beautiful in Spain, 
abound in riches of art and pious memorials, with chief 
among them the Eoyal Chapel, in the prow, as it were, 
of the ship which the cathedral has been likened to, 
keeping the bones not only of the sainted hero, King 
Fernando, but also, among others, the bones of Peter 
the Cruel, and of his unwedded love, Maria de Padilla, 
far too good for Peter in life, if not quite worthy of 
San Fernando in death. You can see the saint's body 
on certain dates four times a year, when, as your 
Baedeker will tell you, " the troops of the garrison 
march past and lower their colors " outside the cathe- 
dral. We were there on none of these dates, and, far 
more regretably, not on the day of Corpus Christi, when 
those boys whose effigies in sculptured and painted wood 
we had seen in the museum at Valladolid pace in their 
mystic dance before the people at the opposite portal 
of the cathedral. But I appoint any reader, so minded, 
to go and witness the rite some springtime for me. 
There is no hurry, for it is destined to endure through 
the device practised in defeating the pope who pro- 
posed to abolish it. He ordained that it should con- 
tinue only as long as the boys' actual costumes lasted; 
but by renewing these carefully wherever they began to 

wear out, they have become practically imperishable. 

213 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 



\ If we missed this attraction of the cathedral, we had 
the high good fortune to witness another ceremony pe- 
culiar to it, but perhaps less popularly acceptable. The 
building had often suffered from earthquakes, and on 
the awful day, dies irce, of the great Lisbon earthquake, 
during mass and at the moment of the elevation of the 
Host, when the worshipers were on their knees, there 
came such a mighty shock in sympathy with the 
far - off cataclysm that the people started to their 
feet and ran out of the cathedral. If the priests 
ran after them, as soon as the apparent danger was 
past they led the return of their flock and resumed the 
interrupted rite. It was, of course, by a. miracle that 
the temple was spared, and when it was realized how 
scarcely Seville had escaped the fate of Lisbon it was 
natural that the event should be dramatized in a per- 
petual observance. Every year now, on the 1st of No- 
vember, the clergy leave the cathedral at a chosen mo- 
ment of the mass, with much more stateliness than in 
the original event, and lead the people out of one portal, 
to return with them by another for the conclusion of the 
ceremonial. 

\We waited long for the climax, but at last we almost 

missed it through the overeagerness of the guide I had 

chosen out of many that petitioned. He was so politely, 

so forbearingly insistent in his offer to see that we were 

vigilantly cared for, that I must have had a heart harder 

than Peter the Gruel's to have denied him, and he 

planted us at the most favorable point for the function 

in the High Chapel, with instructions which portal to 

hurry to when the movement began, and took his peseta 

and went his way. Then, while we confidingly waited, 

214 




mi 







THE CATHEDRAL AND TOWKU OF THE QIRALDA 



FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

he came rushing back and with a great sweep of his 
hat wafted us to the door which he had said the pro- 
cession would go out by, but which he seemed to have 
learned it would come in by, and we were saved from 
what had almost been his fatal error. I forgave him 
the more gladly because I could rejoice in his returning 
to repair his error, although he had collected his money ; 
and with a heart full of pride in his verification of my 
theory of the faithful Spanish nature, I gave myself 
to the shining gorgeousness of the procession that ad- 
vanced chanting in the blaze of the Sevillian sun. There 
was every rank of clergy, from the archbishop down, 
in robes of ceremonial, but I am unable honestly to 
declare the admiration for their splendor which I would 
have willingly felt. The ages of faith in which those 
vestments were designed were apparently not the ages 
of taste ; yet it was the shape of the vestments and not 
the color which troubled the eye of unfaith, if not of 
taste. The archbishop in crimson silk, with his train 
borne by two acolytes, the canons in their purple, the 
dean in his gold-embroidered robes, and the priests and 
choristers in their black robes and white surplices richly 
satisfied it; and if some of the clerics were a little 
frayed and some of the acolytes were spotted with the 
droppings of the candles, these were details which one 
remembered afterward and that did not matter at the 
time. 

When the procession was housed again, we went off 
and forgot it in the gardens of the Alcazar. But I 
must not begin yet on the gardens of the Alcazar. We 
went to them every day, as we did to the cathedral, but 
we did not see them until our second morning in Seville. 
We gave what was left from the first morning in the 
cathedral to a random exploration of the streets and 

places of the citv. There was, no doubt, everywhere 

215 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

some touch of the bravery of our square of San Fer- 
nando, where the public windows were hung with crim- 
son tapestries and brocades in honor of St. Raphael; 
but his holidaj did not make itself molestively felt in 
the city's business or pleasure. Where we could drive 
we drove, and where we must we walked, and we walked 
of course through the famous Calle de las Sierpes, be- 
cause no one drives there. As a rule no woman walks 
there, and naturally there were many women walking 
there, under the eyes of the popular cafes and aristo- 
cratic clubs which principally abound in Las Sierpes, 
for it is also the street of the principal shops, though 
it is not very long and is narrower than many other 
streets of Seville. It has its name from so commonplace 
an origin as the sign over a tavern door, with some 
snakes painted on it ; but if the example of sinuosity 
had been set it by prehistoric serpents, there were scores 
of other streets which have bettered its instruction. 
There were streets that crooked away everywhere, not 
going anywhere, and breaking from time to time into 
irregular angular spaces with a church or a convent or 
a nobleman's house looking into them. 



VI 



The noblemen's houses often showed a severely simple 
f agade to the square or street, and hid their inner glories 
with what could have been fancied a haughty reserve 
if it had not been for the frankness with which they 
opened their patios to the gaze of the stranger, who, 
when he did not halt his carriage before them, could 
enjoy their hospitality from a sidewalk sometimes eigh- 
teen inches wide. The passing tram-car might grind 

him against the tall grilles which were the only barriers 

216 






FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

to the patios, but otherwise there would be nothing to 
spoil his enjoyment of those marble floors and tiled walls 
and fountains potted round with flowering plants. In 
summer he could have seen the family life there; and 
people who are of such oriental seclusion otherwise will 
sometimes even suffer the admiring traveler to come as 
well as look within. But one who would not press their 
hospitality so far could reward his forbearance by find- 
ing some of the patios too new-looking, with rather a 
glare from their tiles and marbles, their painted iron 
pillars, and their glass roofs which the rain comes 
through in the winter. The ladies sit and sew there, 
or talk, if they prefer, and receive their friends, and 
turn night into day in the fashion of climates where 
they are so easily convertible. The patio is the place 
of that peculiarly Spanish rite, the tertulia, and the 
family nightly meets its next of kin and then its nearer 
and farther friends there with that Latin regularity 
which may also be monotony. One patio is often much 
like another, though none was perhaps of so much public 
interest as the patio of the lady who loved a bull-fighter 
and has made her patio a sort of shrine to him. The 
famous espada perished in his heroic calling, no worse 
if no better than those who saw him die, and now his 
bust is in plain view, with a fit inscription recognizing 
his worth and prowess, and with the heads of some of 
the bulls he slew. 

Under that clement sky the elements do not waste 
the works of man as elsewhere, and many of the houses 
of Seville are said to be such as the Moors built there. 
We did not know them from the Christian houses ; but 
there are no longer any mosques, while in our wander- 
ings we had the pretty constant succession of the con- 
vents which, when they are still in the keeping of their 
sisterhoods and brotherhoods, remain monuments of the 

217 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

medieval piety of Spain; or, when they are suppressed 
and turned to secular uses, attest the recurrence of her 
modern moods of revolution and reform. It is to one 
of these that Seville owes the stately Alameda de 
Hercules, a promenade covering the length and breadth 
of aforetime convent gardens, which you reach from the 
Street of the Serpents by the Street of the Love of 
God, and are then startled by the pagan presence of 
two mighty columns lifting aloft the figures of Caesar 
and of the titular demigod. Statues and pillars are 
alike antique, and give you a moment of the Eternal 
City the more intense because the promenade is of an 
unkempt and broken surface, like the Cow-field which 
the Roman Forum used to be. Baedeker calls it shady, 
and I dare say it is shady, but I do not remember the 
trees — only those glorious columns climbing the sum- 
mer sky of the Andalusian autumn, and proclaiming 
the imperishable memory of the republic that conquered 
and the empire that ruled the world, and have never 
loosed their hold upon it. We were rather newly from 
the grass-grown ruin of a Roman town in Wales, and 
in this other Iberian land we were always meeting the 
witnesses of the grandeur which no change short of 
some universal sea change can wholly sweep from the 
earth. Before it Goth and Arab shrink, with all their 
works, into the local and provisional; Rome remains 
for all time imperial and universal. 

\To descend from this high-horsed reflection, as I 
must, I have to record that there did not seem to be 
so many small boys in Seville as in the Castillian cap- 
itals we had visited ; in the very home of the bull-feast 
we did not see one mimic corrida given by the torrcros 
of the future. Not even in the suburb of Triana, where 

the small boys again consolinglv superabounded, was the 

218 







ANCIENT ROMAN COLUMNS LIFTING ALOFT THE FIGURES OF 
HERCULES AND OESAR 



FIKST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

great national game played among the wheels and hoofs 
of the dusty streets to which we crossed the Guadal- 
quivir that afternoon. To be sure, we were so taken 
with other things that a boyish bull-feast might have 
rioted unnoticed under our horses' very feet, especially 
on the long bridge which gives you the far upward 
and downward stretch of the river, so simple and quiet 
and empty above, so busy and noisy and thronged with 
shipping below. I suppose there are lovelier rivers 
than that — we ourselves are known to brag of our Phar- 
par and Abana — but I cannot think of anything more 
nobly beautiful than the Guadalquivir resting at peace 
in her bed, where she has had so many bad dreams of 
Carthaginian and Eoman and Gothic and Arab and 
Norman invasion. Now her waters redden, for the 
time at least, only from the scarlet hulls of the 
tramp steamers lying in long succession beside the 
shore where the gardens of the Delicias were waiting to 
welcome us that afternoon to our first sight of the pride 
and fashion of Seville. I never got enough of the brave 
color of those tramp steamers ; and in thinking of them 
as English, Norse, French, and Dutch, fetching or 
carrying their cargoes over those war-worn, storied 
waters, I had some finer thrills than in dwelling on the 
Tower of Gold which rose from the midst of them. It 
was built in the last century of the Moorish dominion 
to mark the last point to which the gardens of the 
Moorish palace of the Alcazar could stretch, but they 
were long ago obliterated behind it ; and though it was 
so recent, no doubt it would have had its pathos if I 
could ever have felt pity for the downfall of the Moslem 
power in Spain. As it was, I found the tramp steamers 
more moving, and it was these that my eye preferably 
sought whenever I crossed the Triana bridge. 
15 219 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 



VII 



We were often crossing it on one errand or other, but 
now we were especially going to see the gipsy quarter 
of Seville, which disputes with that of Granada the 
infamy of the loathsomest purlieu imaginable. Per- 
haps because it was so very loathsome, I would not 
afterward visit the gipsy quarter in Granada, and if 
such a thing were possible I would willingly unvisit 
the gipsy quarter of Seville. All Triana is pretty 
squalid, though it has merits and charms to which I 
will try eventually to be just, and I must even now 
advise the reader to visit the tile potteries there. If 
he has our good-fortune he may see in the manager of 
one a type of that fusion of races with which Spain 
long so cruelly and vainly struggled after the fall of 
the last Moorish kingdom. He was beautifully lean 
and clean of limb, and of a grave gentleness of man- 
ner; his classically regular face was as swarthy as the 
darkest mulatto's, but his quiet eyes were gray. I car- 
ried the sense of his fine decency with me when we 
drove away from his warerooms, and suddenly whirled 
round the corner of the street into the gipsy quar- 
ter, and made it my prophylactic against the human 
noisomeness which instantly beset our course. Let no 
Romany Rye romancing Barrow, or other fond fibbing 
sentimentalist, ever pretend to me hereafter that those 
persistent savages have even the ridiculous claim of the 
ISTorth American Indians to the interest of the civilized 
man, except as something to be morally and physically 
scoured and washed up, and drained and fumigated, 
and treated with insecticides and put away in moth- 
balls. Our own settled order of things is not agreeable 

at all points ; it reeks and it smells, especially in Spain, 

220 



FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

when you get down to its lower levels; but it does not 
assail the senses with such rank offense as smites them 
in the gipsy quarter with sights and sounds and odors 
which to eye and ear, as well as nose, were all stenches. 

Low huts lined the street, which swarmed at our 

coming with ragged children running beside us and 

after us and screaming, " Minny, mooney, money!" 

in a climax of what they wanted. Men leaned against 

the door-posts and stared motionless, and hags, lean 

and fat, sat on the thresholds and wished to tell our 

fortunes; younger women ranged the sidewalks and 

offered to dance. They all had flowers in their hair, 

and some were of a horrible beauty, especially one in a 

green waist, with both white and red flowers in her 

dusky locks. Down the middle of the road a troop of 

children, some blond, but mostly black, tormented a 

hapless ass colt; and we hurried away as fast as our 

guide could persuade our cabman to drive. But the 

gipsy quarter had another street in reserve which made 

us sorry to have left the first. It paralleled the river, 

and into the center of it every manner of offal had been 

cast from the beginning of time to reek and fester and 

juicily ripen and rot in unspeakable corruption. It 

was such a thoroughfare as Dante might have imagined 

in his Hell, if people in his time had minded such 

horrors; but as it was we could only realize that it 

was worse than infernal, it was medieval, and that we 

were driving in such putrid foulness as the gilded 

carriages of kings and queens and the prancing steeds 

and palfreys of knights and ladies found their way 

through whenever they went abroad in the picturesque 

and romantic Middle Ages. I scarcely remember now 

how we got away and down to the decent waterside, and 

then by the helpful bridge to the other shore of the 

221 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

Guadalquivir, painted red with the reflections of those 
consoling tramp steamers. 

After that abhorrent home of indolence, which its 
children never left except to do a little fortune-telling 
and mule and donkey trading, eked out with theft in 
the country round, any show of honest industry looked 
wholesome and kind. I rejoiced almost as much in the 
machinery as in the men who were loading the steamers ; 
even the huge casks of olives, which were working from 
the salt-water poured into them and frothing at the 
bung in great white sponges of spume, might have been 
examples of toil by which those noisome vagabonds 
could well have profited. But now we had come to 
see another sort of leisure — the famous leisure of for- 
tune and fashion driving in the Delicias, but perhaps 
never quite fulfilling the traveler's fond ideal of it. 
We came many times to the Delicias in hope of it, with 
decreasing disappointment, indeed, but to the last with- 
out entire fruition. For our first visit we could not 
have had a fitter evening, with its pale sky reddening 
from a streak of sunset beyond Triana, and we arrived 
in appropriate circumstance, round the immense circle 
of the bull-ring and past the palace which the Due 
de Montpensier has given the church for a theological 
seminary, with long stretches of beautiful gardens. 
Then we were in the famous Paseo, a drive with foot- 
ways on each side, and on one side dusky groves widen- 
ing to the river. The paths were lit with gleaming 
statues, and among the palms and the eucalyptuses 
were orange trees full of their golden globes, which 
we wondered were not stolen till we were told they were 
of that bitter sort which are mostly sent to Scotland, 
not because they are in accord with the acrid nature of 
man there, but that they may be wrought into marma- 
lade. On the other hand stretched less formal woods, 

222 



EIKST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

with fields for such polite athletics as tennis, which 
the example of the beloved young English Queen of 
Spain is bringing into reluctant favor with women im- 
memorially accustomed to immobility. The road was 
badly kept, like most things in Spain, where when a 
thing is done it is expected to stay done. Every after- 
noon it is a cloud of dust and every evening a welter 
of mud, for the Iberian idea of watering a street is to 
soak it into a slough. But nothing can spoil the Paseo, 
and that evening we had it mostly to ourselves, though 
there were two or three carriages with ladies in 
hats, and at one place other ladies dismounted and 
courageously walking, while their carriages followed. 
A magnate of some sort was shut alone in a brougham, 
in the care of footman and coachman with deeply 
silver-banded hats; there were a few military and 
civil riders, and there was distinctly a young man in 
a dog-cart with a groom, keeping abreast the landau 
of three ladies in mantillas, with whom he was improv- 
ing what seemed a chance acquaintance. Along the 
course the public park gave way at times to the grounds 
of private villas; before one of these a boy did what 
he could for us by playing ball with a priest. At other 
points there were booths with chairs and tables, where 
I am sure interesting parties of people would have been 
sitting if they could have expected us to pass. 



VIII 



The reader, pampered by the brilliant excitements of 
our American promenades, may think this spectacle of 
the gay world of Seville dull; but he ought to have 
been with us a colder, redder, and sadder evening when 
we had the Delicias still more to ourselves. After- 

223 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

ward the Delicias seemed to cheer up, and the place 
was fairly frequented on a holiday, which we had not 
suspected was one till our cabman convinced us from 
his tariff that we must pay him double, because you 
must always do that in Seville on holidays. By this 
time we knew that most of the Sevillian rank and 
riches had gone to Madrid for the winter, and we 
were the more surprised by some evident show of 
them in the private turnouts where by far most of 
the turnouts were public. But in Spain a carriage 
is a carriage, and the Sevillian cabs are really very 
proper and sometimes even handsome, and we felt that 
our own did no discredit to the Delicias. Many of the 
holiday-makers were walking, and there were actually 
women on foot in hats and hobble-skirts without being 
openly mocked. On the evening of our last resort to 
the Delicias it was quite thronged far into the twilight, 
after a lemon sunset that continued to tinge the east 
with pink and violet. There were hundreds of car- 
riages, fully half of them private, with coachmen and 
footmen in livery. With them it seemed to be the rule 
to stop in the circle at a turning-point a mile off and 
watch the going and coming. It was a serious spectacle, 
but not solemn, and it had its reliefs, its high-lights. 
It was always pleasant to see three Spanish ladies on 
a carriage seat, the middle one protruding because of 
their common bulk, and oftener in umbrella-wide hats 
with towering plumes than in the charming mantilla. 
There were no top-hats or other formality in the men's 
dress ; some of them were on horseback, and there were 
two women riding. 

Suddenly, as if it had come up out of the ground, I 
perceived a tram-car keeping abreast of the riding and 
walking and driving, and through all I was agreeablv 
aware of files of peasants bestriding their homing don- 

224 






FIKST DAYS IN SEVILLE 

keys on the bridle-path next the tram. I confess that 
they interested me more than my social equals and 
superiors ; I should have liked to talk with those fathers 
and mothers of toil, bestriding or perched on the crup- 
pers of their donkeys, and I should have liked especially 
to know what passed in the mind of one dear little girl 
who sat before her father with her bare brown legs 
tucked into the pockets of the pannier. 



X 

SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

It is always a question how much or little we had 
better know about the history of a strange country when 
seeing it. If the great mass of travelers voted accord- 
ing to their ignorance, the majority in favor of knowing 
next to nothing would be overwhelming, and I do not 
say they would be altogether unwise. History itself is 
often of two minds about the facts, or the truth from 
them, and when you have stored away its diverse con- 
clusions, and you begin to apply them to the actual 
conditions, you are constantly embarrassed by the mis- 
fits. What did it avail me to believe that when the 
Goths overran the north of Spain the Vandals overran 
the south, and when they swept on into Africa and 
melted away in the hot sun there as a distinctive race, 
they left nothing but the name Vandalusia, a letter 
less, behind them? If the Vandals were what they 
are reported to have been, the name does not at all 
characterize the liveliest province of Spain. Besides, 
the very next history told me that they took even their 
name with them, and forbade me the simple and apt 
etymology which I had pinned my indolent faith to. 



Before I left Seville I convinced a principal book- 
seller, much against his opinions, that there must be 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

some such brief local history of the city as I was fond 
of finding in Italian towns, and I took it from his own 
reluctant shelf. It was a very intelligent little guide, 
this Seville in the Hand, as it calls itself, but I got it 
too late for use in exploring the city, and now I can 
turn to it only for those directions which will keep the 
reader from losing his way in the devious past. The 
author rejects the fable which the chroniclers delight 
in, and holds with historians who accept the Phoenicians 
as the sufficiently remote founders of Seville. This 
does not put out of commission those Biblical " ships 
of Tarshish " which Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in his 
graphic sketch of Spanish history, has sailing to and 
from the neighboring coasts. Very likely they came 
up the Guadalquivir, and lay in the stream where a 
few thousand years later I saw those cheerful tramp- 
steamers lying. At any rate, the Phoenicians greatly 
flourished there, and gave their colony the name of 
Hispalis, which it remained content with till the Ro- 
mans came and called the town Julia Romula, and 
Julius Caesar fenced it with the strong walls which the 
Moorish conquerors, after the Goths, reinforced and 
have left plain to be seen at this day. The most casual 
of wayfaring men must have read as he ran that the 
Moorish power fell before the sword of San Fernando 
as the Gothic fell before their own, and the Roman 
before the Gothic. Rut it is more difficult to realize 
that earlier than the Gothic, somewhere in between the 
Vandals and the Romans, had been the Carthaginians, 
whose great general Hamilcar fancied turning all Spain 
into a Carthaginian province. They were a branch of 
the Phoenicians as even the older, unadvertised edition 
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica will tell, and the 
Phoenicians were a sort of Hebrews. Whether they 

remained to flourish with the other Jews under the 

227 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

Moors, my Sevilla en la Mano does not say ; and I am 
not sure whether they survived to share the universal 
exile into which Islam and Israel were finally driven. 
What is certain is, that the old Phoenician name of 
Hispalis outlived the Roman name of Julia Romula 
and reappeared in the Arabic as Ishbiliya (I know it 
from my Baedeker) and is now permanently established 
as Seville. 

Under the Moors the city was subordinate to Cor- 
dova, though I can hardly bear to think so in my far 
greater love of Seville. But it was the seat of schools 
of science, art, and agriculture, and after the Chris- 
tians had got it back, Alfonso the Learned founded 
other schools there for the study of Latin and Arabic. 
But her greatest prosperity and glory came to Seville 
with the discovery of America. E"ot Columbus only, 
but all his most famous contemporaries, sailed from 
the ports of her coasts ; she was the capital of the com- 
merce with the new world, ruling and regulating it by 
the oldest mercantile tribunal in the world, and becom- 
ing the richest city of Spain. Then riches flowered in 
the letters and arts, especially the arts, and Herrera, 
Pacheco, Velasquez, Murillo, and Zurburan were born 
and flourished in Seville. In modern times she has 
taken a prominent part in political events. She led 
in the patriotic war to drive out the armies of Napoleon, 
and she seems to have been on both sides in the struggle 
for liberal and absolutist principles, the establishment 
of the brief republic of 1868, and the restoration of the 
present monarchy. 

Through all the many changes from better to Worse, 
from richer to poorer, Seville continued faithful to the 
ideal of religious unity which the wise Isabel and the 
shrewd Ferdinand divined was the only means of con- 
solidating the intensely provincial kingdoms of Spain 

228 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

into one nation of Spaniards. Andalusia not being 
Gothic had never been Aryan, and it was one of her 
kings who carried his orthodoxy to Castile and estab- 
lished it inexpugnably at Toledo after he succeeded 
his heretical father there. When four or five hundred 
years later it became a political necessity of the Catholic 
Kings to expel their Jewish and Moorish subjects and 
convert their wealth to pious and patriotic uses, Anda- 
lusia was one of the most zealous provinces in the cause. 
When presently the inquisitions of the Holy Office be- 
gan, some five hundred heretics were burned alive at 
Seville before the year was out ; many others, who were 
dead and buried, paid the penalty of their heresy in 
effigy; in all more than two thousand suffered in the 
region round about. Before he was in Valladolid, Tor- 
quemada was in Seville, and there he drew up the rules 
that governed the procedure of the Inquisition through- 
out Spain. A magnificent quemadero, or crematory, 
second only to that of Madrid, was built: a square 
stone platform where almost every day the smoke of 
human sacrifice ascended. This crematory for the liv- 
ing was in the meadow of San Sebastian, now a part 
of the city park system which we left on the right that 
first evening when we drove to the Delicias. I do not 
know why I should now regret not having visited the 
place of this dreadful altar and offered my unavailing 
pity there to the memory of those scores of thousands 
of hapless martyrs who suffered there to no end, not 
even to the end of confirming Spain in the faith one and 
indivisible, for there are now, after so many generations 
of torment, two Protestant churches in Seville. For 
one thing I did not know where the place of the quema- 
dero was ; and I do not yet know where those Protestant 
churches are. 

229 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 



ii 



If I went again to Seville I should try to visit them — 
but, as it was, we gave our second day to the Alcazar, 
which is merely the first in the series of palaces and 
gardens once stretching from the flank of the cathedral 
to the Tower of Gold beside the Guadalquivir. A rich 
sufficiency is left in the actual Alcazar to suggest the 
splendor of the series, and more than enough in the 
gardens to invite our fatigue, day after day, to the 
sun and shade of its quiet paths and seats when we came 
spent with the glories and the bustling piety of the 
cathedral. In our first visit we had the guidance of a 
patriotic young Granadan whose zeal for the Alhambra 
would not admit the Alcazar to any comparison, but I 
myself still prefer it after seeing the Alhambra. It is 
as purely Moorish as that and it is in better repair if 
not better taste. The taste in fact is the same, and the 
Castilian kings consulted it as eagerly as their Arabic 
predecessors in the talent of the Moslem architects 
whom they had not yet begun to drive into exile. I 
am not going to set up rival to the colored picture 
postals, which give a better notion than I could give 
of the painted and gilded stucco decoration, the in- 
genious geometrical designs on the walls, and the cloy- 
ing sweetness of the honeycombing in the vaulted roofs. 
Every one will have his feeling about Moorish archi- 
tecture ; mine is that a little goes a great way, and that 
it is too monotonous to compete with the Gothic in 
variety, while it lacks the dignity of any form of the 
Greek or the Eenaissance. If the phrase did not insult 
the sex which the faith of the Moslem insufferably 
insults, one might sum up one's slight for it in the 
word effeminate. 

230 




GARDENS OF THE ALCAZAR 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

The Alcazar gardens are the best of the Alcazar. 
But I would not ignore the homelike charm of the vast 
court by which you enter from the street outside to the 
palace beyond. It is planted casually about with rather 
shabby orange trees that children were playing under, 
and was decorated with the week's wash of the low, 
simple dwellings which may be hired at a rental mod- 
erate even for Seville, where a handsome and com- 
modious house in a good quarter rents for sixty dollars 
a year. One of those two-story cottages, as we should 
call them, in the ante-court of the Alcazar had for the 
student of Spanish life the special advantage of a lover 
close to a ground-floor window dropping tender noth- 
ings down through the slats of the shutter to some 
maiden lurking within. The nothings were so tender 
that you could not hear them drop, and, besides, they 
were Spanish nothings, and it would not have served 
any purpose for the stranger to listen for them. Once 
afterward we saw the national courtship going on at 
another casement, but that was at night, and here the 
precious first sight of it was offered at ten o'clock in 
the morning. Nobody seemed to mind the lover sta- 
tioned outside the shutter with which the iron bars 
forbade him the closest contact; and it is only fair to 
say that he minded nobody ; he was there when we went 
in and there when we came out, and it appears that 
when it is a question of love-making time is no more an 
object in Spain than in the United States. The scene 
would have been better by moonlight, but you cannot 
always have it moonlight, and the sun did very well; 
at least, the lover did not seem to miss the moon. 

He was only an incident, and I hope the most ro- 
mantic reader will let me revert from him to the Alcazar 
gardens. We were always reverting to them on any 
pretext or occasion, and we mostly had them to ourselves 

231 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

in the gentle afternoons when we strayed or sat about 
at will in them. The first day we were somewhat mo- 
lested by the instruction of our patriotic Granadan 
guide, who had a whopper-jaw and grayish blue eyes, 
but coal-black hair for all his other blondness. He 
smoked incessant cigarettes, and he showed us especially 
the pavilion of Charles the Fifth, whom, after that 
use of all English-speaking Spanish guides, he called 
Charley Fift. It appeared that the great emperor used 
this pavilion for purposes of meditation; but he could 
not always have meditated there, though the frame of 
a brazier standing in the center intimated that it was 
tempered for reflection. The first day we found a small 
bird in possession, flying from one bit of the carved 
wooden ceiling to another, and then, taking our presence 
in dudgeon, out into the sun. Another day there was 
a nursery-girl there with a baby that cried ; on another, 
still more distractingly, a fashionable young French 
bride who went kodaking round while her husband 
talked with an archaeological official, evidently Spanish. 
In his own time, Charley probably had the place more 
to himself, though even then his thoughts could not 
have been altogether cheerful, whether he recalled what 
he had vainly done to keep out of Spain and yet to 
take the worst of Spain with him into the Xetherlands, 
where he tried to plant the Inquisition among his Flem- 
ings; he was already much soured with a world that 
had cloyed him, and was perhaps considering even then 
how he might make his escape from it to the cloister. 



in 

We did not know as yet how almost entirely dramatic 
the palace of the Alcazar was, how largely it was repre- 
sentative of what the Spanish successors of the Moorish 

232 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

kings thought those kings would have made it if they 
had made it; and it was probably through an instinct 
for the genuine that we preferred the gardens after 
our first cries of wonder. What remains to me of our 
many visits is the mass of high borders of box, with 
roses, jasmine, and orange trees, palms, and cypresses. 
The fountains dribbled rather than gushed, and every- 
where were ranks and rows of plants in large, high 
earthen pots beside or upon the tiled benching that 
faced the fountains and would have been easier to sit 
on if you had not had to supply the back yourself. The 
flowers were not in great profusion, and chiefly we 
rejoiced in the familiar quaintness of clumps of massive 
blood-red coxcombs and strange yellow ones. The walks 
were bordered with box, and there remains distinctly 
the impression of marble steps and mosaic seats inlaid 
with tiles ; all Seville seems inlaid with tiles. One 
afternoon we lingered longer than usual because the day 
was so sunnily warm in the garden paths and spaces, 
without being hot. A gardener whom we saw oftenest 
hung about his flowers in a sort of vegetable calm, and 
not very different from theirs except that they were 
not smoking cigarettes. He did not move a muscle 
or falter in his apparently unseeing gaze; but when 
one of us picked a seed from the ground and wondered 
what it was he said it was a magnolia seed, and as if 
he could bear no more went away. In one wilding place 
which seemed set apart for a nursery several men were 
idly working with many pauses, but not so many as 
to make the spectator nervous. As the afternoon waned 
and the sun sank, its level rays dwelt on the galleries 
of the palace which Peter the Cruel built himself and 
made so ugly with harsh brown stucco ornament that 
it set your teeth on edge, and with gigantic frescos 

exaggerated from the Italian, and very coarse and rank. 

233 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

» It was this savage prince who invented much of the 
Alcazar in the soft Moorish taste ; but in those hideous 
galleries he let his terrible nature loose, though as for 
that some say he was no cruder than certain other Span- 
ish kings of that period. This is the notion of my 
unadvertised Encyclopaedia Britannica, and perhaps 
we ought to think of him leniently as Peter the Fero- 
cious. He was kind to some people and was popularly 
known as the Justiciary; he especially liked the Moors 
and Jews, who were gratefully glad, poor things, of 
being liked by any one under the new Christian rule. 
But he certainly killed several of his half-brothers, and 
notably he killed his half-brother Don Fadrique in the 
Alcazar. That is, if he had no hand in the butchery 
himself he had him killed after limns: him to Seville 
for the tournaments and forgiving him for all their 
mutual injuries with every caressing circumstance. 
One reads that after the king has kissed him he sits 
down again to his game of backgammon and Don 
Fadrique goes into the next room to Maria de Padilla, 
the lovely and gentle lady whom Don Pedro has mar- 
ried as much as he can with a wedded wife shut up 
in Toledo. She sits there in terror with her damsels 
and tries with looks and signs to make Don Fadrique 
aware of his danger. But he imagines no harm till the 
king and his companions, with their daggers drawn, 
come to the curtains, which the king parts, command- 
ing, " Seize the Master of Santiago !" Don Fadrique 
tries to draw his sword, and then he turns and flies 
through the halls of the Alcazar, where he finds 
every door bolted and barred. The king's men are 
at his heels, and at last one of them fells him with 
a blow of his mace. The king goes back with a 
face of sympathy to Maria, who has fallen to the 

floor. 

234 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

'• The treacherous keeping is all rather in the taste 
of the Italian Renaissance, but the murder itself is 
more Roman, as the Spanish atrocities and amusements 
are apt to be. Murray says it was in the beautiful Hall 
of the Ambassadors that Don Fadrique was killed, but 
the other manuals are not so specific. Wherever it 
was, there is a blood-stain in the pavement which our 
Granadan guide failed to show us, possibly from a 
patriotic pique that there are no blood-stains in the 
Alhambra with personal associations. I cannot say 
that much is to be made of the vaulted tunnel where 
poor Maria de Padilla used to bathe, probably not much 
comforted by the courtiers afterward drinking the water 
from the tank; she must have thought the compliment 
rather nasty, and no doubt it was paid her to please 
Don Pedro. 

We found it pleasanter going and coming through 
the corridor leading to the gardens from the public 
court. This was kept at the outer end by an " old 
rancid Christian " smoking incessant cigarettes and not 
explicitly refusing to sell us picture postals after tak- 
ing our entrance fee ; the other end was held by a young, 
blond, sickly-looking girl, who made us take small nose- 
gays at our own price and whom it became a game to 
see if we could escape. I have left saying to the last 
that the king and queen of Spain have a residence in 
the Alcazar, and that when they come in the early 
spring they do not mind coming to it through that 
plebeian quadrangle. I should not mind it myself if 
I could go back there next spring. 



IV 

We had refused with loathing the offer of those gipsy 
jades to dance for us in their noisome purlieu at Triana, 
16 235 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TKAVELS 

but we were not proof against the chance of seeing some 
gipsy dancing in a cafe-theater one night in Seville. 
The decent place was filled with the " plain people," 
who sat with their hats on at rude tables smoking and 
drinking coffee from tall glasses. They were apparent- 
ly nearly all working-men who had left nearly all their 
wives to keep on working at home, though a few of 
these also had come. On a small stage four gipsy girls, 
in unfashionably and untheatrically decent gowns of 
white, blue, or red, with flowers in their hair, sat in 
a semicircle with one subtle, silent, darkling man among 
them. One after another they got up and did the same 
twisting and posturing, without dancing, and while 
one posed and contorted the rest unenviously joined 
the spectators in their clapping and their hoarse cries 
of " Ole !" It was all perfectly proper except for one 
high moment of indecency thrown in at the end of 
each turn, as if to give the house its money's worth. 
But the real, overflowing compensation came when that 
little, lithe, hipless man in black jumped to his feet 
and stormed the audience with a dance of hands and 
arms, feet and legs, head, neck, and the whole body, 
which Mordkin in his finest frenzy could not have 
equaled or approached. Whatever was fiercest and wild- 
est in nature and boldest in art was there, and now the 
house went mad with its hand-clappings and table- 
hammerings and deep-throated " Oles !" 

Another night we went to the academy of the world- 
renowned Otero and saw the instruction of Sevillian 
youth in native dances of the haute ecole. The academy 
used to be free to a select public, but now the chosen, 
who are nearly always people from the hotels, must 
pay ten pesetas each for their pleasure, and it is not 
too much for a pleasure so innocent and charming. Th( 
academy is on the ground floor of the maestro' s unpre- 

236 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

tentious house, and in a waiting-room beyond the shoe- 
maker's shop which rilled the vestibule sat, patient in 
their black mantillas, the mothers and nurses of the 
pupils. These were mostly quite small children in their 
every-day clothes, but there were two or three older 
girls in the conventional dancing costume which a lady 
from one of the hotels had emulated. Everything was 
very simple and friendly ; Otero found good seats among 
the aficionados for the guests presented to him, and then 
began calling his pupils to the floor of the long, narrow 
room with quick commands of " Venga !" A piano was 
tucked away in a corner, but the dancers kept time now 
with castanets and now by snapping their fingers. Two 
of the oldest girls, who were apparently graduates, were 
" differently beautiful " in their darkness and fairness, 
but alike picturesquely Spanish in their vivid dresses 
and the black veils fluttering from their high combs. 
A youth in green velvet jacket and orange trousers, 
whose wonderful dancing did him credit as Otero's prize 
pupil, took part with them; he had the square-jawed, 
high-cheek-boned face of the lower-class Spaniard, and 
they the oval of all Spanish women. Here there was 
no mere posturing and contortioning among the girls 
as with the gipsies ; they sprang like flames and stamped 
the floor with joyous detonations of their slippers. It 
was their convention to catch the hat from the head of 
some young spectator and wear it in a figure and then 
toss it back to him. One of them enacted the part 
of a torero at a bull-fight, stamping round first in a 
green satin cloak which she then waved before a man's 
felt hat thrown on the ground to represent the bull 
hemmed about with banderillas stuck quivering into 
the floor. But the prettiest thing was the dancing of 
two little girl pupils, one fair and thin and of an 

angelic gracefulness, and the other plump and dark, 

237 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

who was as dramatic as the blond was lyrical. They 
accompanied themselves with castanets, and, though the 
little fatling toed in and wore a common dress of blue- 
striped gingham, I am afraid she won our hearts from 
her graceful rival. Both were very serious and gave 
their whole souls to the dance, but they were not more 
childishly earnest than an older girl in black who danced 
with one of the gaudy graduates, panting in her anxious 
zeal and stopping at last with her image of the Virgin 
she resembled flung wildly down her back from the 
place where it had hung over her heart. 



We preferred walking home from Senor Otero's house 
through the bright, quiescing street, because in driving 
there we had met with an adventure which we did not 
care to repeat. We were driving most un aggressively 
across a small plaza, with a driver and a friend on the 
box beside him to help keep us from harm, when a 
trolley-car came wildly round a corner at the speed of 
at least two miles an hour and crossed our track. Our 
own speed was such that we could not help striking 
the trolley in a collision which was the fault of no one 
apparently. The front of the car was severely banged, 
one mud-guard of our victoria was bent, and our con- 
versation was interrupted. Immediately a crowd as- 
sembled from the earth or the air, but after a single 
exchange of reproaches between the two drivers nothing 
was said by any one. No policeman arrived to constate r 
the facts, and after the crowd had silently satisfied or 
dissatisfied itself that no one was hurt it silently dis- 
persed. The car ambled grumbling off and we drove 

on with some vague murmurs from our driver, whose 

238 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

nerves seemed shaken, but who was supported in a some- 
what lurching and devious progress by the caressing 
arm of the friend on the seat beside him. 

All this was in Seville, where the popular emotions 
are painted in travel and romance as volcanic as at 
Naples, where no one would have slept the night of 
our accident and the spectators would be debating it 
still. In our own surprise and alarm we partook of 
the taciturnity of the witnesses, which I think was 
rather fine and was much decenter than any sort of 
utterance. On our way home we had occasion to prac- 
tise a like forbearance toward the lover whom we passed 
as he stood courting through the casement of a ground 
floor. The soft air was full of the sweet of jasmine 
and orange blossoms from the open patios. Many peo- 
ple besides ourselves were passing, but in a well-bred 
avoidance of the dark figure pressed to the grating and 
scarcely more recognizable than the invisible figure 
within. I confess I thought it charming, and if at 
some period of their lives people must make love I 
do not believe there is a more inoffensive way of do- 
ing it. 

\By the sort of echo notable in life's experience we 
had a reverberation of the orange-flower perfume of 
that night in the orange-flower honey at breakfast next 
morning. We lived to learn that our own bees gather 
the same honey from the orange flowers of Florida ; but 
at the time we believed that only the bees of Seville 
did it, and I still doubt whether anywhere in America 
the morning wakes to anything like the long, rich, sad 
calls of the Sevillian street hucksters. It is true that 
you do not get this plaintive music without the ac- 
companying note of the hucksters' donkeys, which, if 
they were better advised, would not close with the sort 
of inefficient sifnication which they now use in spoiling 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

an otherwise most noble, most leonine roar. But when 
were donkeys of any sort ever well advised in all re- 
spects ? Those of Seville, where donkeys abound, were 
otherwise of the superior intelligence which through- 
out Spain leaves the horse and even the mule far be- 
hind, and constitutes the donkeys, far beyond the idle 
and useless dogs, the friends of man. They indefinitely 
outnumber the dogs, and the cats are of course nowhere 
in the count. Yet I would not misprize the cats of 
Seville, which apparently have their money price. We 
stopped to admire a beautiful white one, on our way 
to see the market one day, praising it as intelligibly 
as we could, and the owner caught it up, when we had 
passed and ran after us, and offered to sell it to us. 

That might have been because it was near the market 
where we experienced almost the only mercantile zeal 
we had known in Spain. Women with ropes and gar- 
lands of onions round their necks invited us to buy, 
and we had hopeful advances from the stalls of salads 
and fruits, where there was a brave and beautiful show 
of lettuces and endives, grapes, medlars, and heaps of 
melons, but no oranges; I do not know why, though 
there were shining masses of red peppers and green 
peppers, and vast earthen bowls with yellow peas soak- 
ing in them. The flowers were every gay autumnal 
sort, especially dahlias, sometimes made into stiff bou- 
quets, perhaps for church offerings. There were mounds 
of chestnuts, four or five feet high and wide ; and these 
flowers and fruits filled the interior of the market, while 
the stalls for the flesh and fish were on the outside. 
There seemed more sellers than buyers; here and there 
were ladies buying, but it is said that the mistresses 
commonly send their maids for the daily provision. 

Ordinarily I should say you could not go amiss for 
your profit and pleasure in Seville, but there are certain 

240 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

imperative objects of interest like the Casa de Pilatos 
which you really have to do. Strangely enough, it is 
very well worth doing, for, though it is even more 
factitiously Moorish than the Alcazar, it is of almost 
as great beauty and of greater dignity. Gardens, gal- 
leries, staircases, statues, paintings, all are interesting, 
with a mingled air of care and neglect which is peculiar- 
ly charming, though perhaps the keener sensibilities, the 
morbider nerves may suffer from the glare and hardness 
of the tiling which render the place so wonderful and 
so exquisite. One must complain of something, and I 
complain of the tiling; I do not mind the house being 
supposed like the house of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem. 

^It belongs to the Duke of Medina-Celi, who no more 
comes to it from Madrid than the Duke of Alva comes 
to his house, which I somehow perversely preferred. 
For one thing, the Alva palace has eleven patios, all 
far more forgotten than the four in the House of Pilate, 
and I could fully glut my love of patios without seeing 
half of them. Besides, it was in the charge of a typical 
Spanish family: a lean, leathery, sallow father, a fat, 
immovable mother, and a tall, silent daughter. The 
girl showed us darkly about the dreary place, with its 
fountains and orange trees and palms, its damp, Mo- 
resque, moldy walls, its damp, moldy, beautiful wooden 
ceilings, and its damp, moldy staircase leading to the 
family rooms overhead, which we could not see. The 
family stays for a little time only in the spring and 
fall, but if ever they stay so late as we had come the 
sunlight lying so soft and warm in the patio and the 
garden out of it must have made them as sorry to leave 
it as we were. 

V I am not sure but I valued the House of Alva some- 
what for the chance my visit to it gave me of seeing a 
Sevillian tenement-house such as I had hoped I might 

241 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

see. One hears that such houses are very scrupulously 
kept by the janitors who compel the tenants to a cleanli- 
ness not perhaps always their nature. At any rate, 
this one, just across the way from the Alva House, was 
of a surprising neatness. It was built three stories 
high, with galleries looking into an open court and doors 
giving from these into the several tenements. As for- 
tune, which does not continually smile on travel, would 
have it that morning, two ladies of the house were 
having a vivid difference of opinion on an upper gallery. 
Or at least one was, for the other remained almost as 
silent as the spectators who grouped themselves about 
her or put their heads out of the windows to see, as 
well as hear, what it was about. I wish I knew and I 
would tell the reader. The injured party, and I am 
sure she must have been deeply injured, showered her 
enemy with reproaches, and each time when she had 
emptied the vials of her wrath with much shaking of her 
hands in the wrong-doer's face she went away a few 
yards and filled them up again and then returned for a 
fresh discharge. It was perfectly like a scene of Gol- 
doni and like many a passage of real life in his native 
city, and I was rapt in it across fifty years to the Venice 
I used to know. But the difference in Seville was that 
there was actively only one combatant in the strife, and 
the witnesses took no more part in it than the passive 
resistant. 



VI 



As a contrast to this violent scene which was not so 
wholly violent but that it was relieved by a boy teas- 
ing a cat with his cap in the foreground, and the sweet 
singing of canaries in the windows of the houses near, 
I may commend the Casa de los Venerables, ecclesi- 

242 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

astics somehow related to the cathedral and having 
their tranquil dwelling not far from it. The street 
we took from the Duke of Alva's palace was so nar- 
row and crooked that we scraped the walls in passing, 
and we should never have got by one heavily laden 
donkey if he had not politely pushed the side of his 
pannier into a doorway to make room for us. When we 
did get to the Casa de los Yenerables we found it 
mildly yellow-washed and as beautifully serene and 
sweet as the house of venerable men should be. Its 
distinction in a world of patios was a patio where the 
central fountain was sunk half a story below the en- 
trance floor, and encircled by a stairway by which the 
humble neighbor folk freely descended to fill their 
water jars. I suppose that gentle mansion has other 
merits, but the fine staircase that ended under a baroque 
dome left us facing a bolted door, so that we had to 
guess at those attractions, which I leave the reader to 
imagine in turn. 

I have kept the unique wonder of Seville waiting too 
long already for my recognition, though in its eight 
hundred years it should have learned patience enough 
for worse things. From its great antiquity alone, if 
from nothing else, it is plain that the Giralda at Seville 
could not have been studied from the tower of the Madi- 
son Square Garden in New York, which the American 
will recall when he sees it. If the case must be re- 
versed and we must allow that the Madison Square 
tower was studied from the Giralda, we must still recog- 
nize that it is no servile copy, but in its frank imitation 
has a grace and beauty which achieves originality. 
Still, the Giralda is always the Giralda, and, though 
there had been no Saint-Gaudens to tip its summit 
with such a flying-footed nymph as poises on our own 

tower, the figure of Faith which crowns it is at least 

243 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

a good weather-vane, and from its office of turning gives 
the mighty bell-tower its name. Long centuries before 
the tower was a belfry it served the mosque, which the 
cathedral now replaces, as a minaret for the muezzin 
to call the faithful to prayer, but it was then only two- 
thirds as high. The Christian belfry which continues 
it is not in offensive discord with the structure below; 
its other difference in form and spirit achieves an im- 
possible harmony. The Giralda, however, chiefly works 
its enchantment by its color, but here I must leave the 
proof of this to the picture postal which now everywhere 
takes the bread out of the word-painter's mouth. The 
time was when with a palette full of tinted adjectives 
one might hope to do an unrivaled picture of the Giral- 
da; but that time is gone; and if the reader has not 
a colored postal by him he should lose no time in going 
to Seville and seeing the original. For the best view 
of it I must advise a certain beautifully irregular small 
court in the neighborhood, with simple houses so low 
that you can easily look up over their roofs and see the 
mighty bells of the Giralda rioting far aloof, flinging 
themselves beyond the openings of the belfry and deaf- 
eningly making believe to leap out into space. If the 
traveler fails to And this court (for it seems now and 
then to be taken in and put away), he need not despair 
of seeing the Giralda fitly. He cannot see Seville at 
all without seeing it, and from every point, far or near, 
he sees it grand and glorious. 

I remember it especially from beyond the Guadal- 
quivir in the drive we took through Triana to the vil- 
lage of Italica, where three Roman emperors were born, 
as the guide-books will officiously hasten to tell, and 
steal away your chance of treating your reader with 
any effect of learned research. These emperors (I will 
not be stopped by any guide-book from saying) were 

244 



(L=MiiLiy v/ /..,:' 







SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius; and Triana is named 
for the first of them. Fortunately, we turned to the 
right after crossing the bridge and so escaped the gipsy 
quarter, but we paused through a long street so swarm- 
ing with children that we wondered to hear whole 
schoolrooms full of them humming and droning their 
lessons as we made our way among the tenants. For- 
tunately, they played mostly in the gutters, the larger 
looking after the smaller when their years and riches 
were so few more, with that beautiful care which child- 
hood bestows on babyhood everywhere in Europe. To 
say that those Spanish children were as tenderly watch- 
ful of these Spanish babies as English children is to 
say everything. Now and then a mother cared for a 
babe as only a mother can in an office which the pictures 
and images of the Most Holy Virgin consecrate and en- 
dear in lands where the sterilized bottle is unknown, 
but oftenest it was a little sister that held it in her 
arms and crooned whatever was the Spanish of — 

Rack back, baby, daddy shot a b'ar; 
Rack back, baby, see it hangin' thar. 

For there are no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were 
none in our backwoods, and the little maids tilted to 
and fro on the fore legs and hind legs of their chairs 
and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic joltings. 
When the street turned into a road it turned into a 
road a hundred feet wide; one of those roads which 
Charles III., when he came to the Spanish throne from 
Naples, full of beneficent projects and ideals, bestowed 
upon his unwilling and ungrateful subjects. These 
roads were made about the middle of the eighteenth 
century, and they have been gathering dust ever since, 
so that the white powder now lies in the one beyond 
Triana five or six inches deep. Along the sides oc- 

245 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

casional shade-trees stifled, and beyond these gaunt, 
verdureless fields widened away, though we were told 
that in the spring the fields were red with flowers 
and green with young wheat. There were no market- 
gardens, and the chief crop seemed brown pigs and 
black goats. In some of the foregrounds, as well as 
the backgrounds, were olive orchards with olives heaped 
under them and peasants still resting from their midday 
breakfast. A mauve bell-shaped flower plentifully 
fringed the wayside; our driver said it had no name, 
and later an old peasant said it was " bad." 



VII 



We passed a convent turned into a prosperous-look- 
ing manufactory and we met a troop of merry priests 
talking gayly and laughing together, and very effective 
in their black robes against the white road. When 
we came to the village that was a municipium under 
Augustus and a colonia under Hadrian, we found it 
indeed scanty and poor, but very neat and self-respect- 
ful-looking, and not unworthy to have been founded by 
Scipio Africanus two hundred years before Christ. 
Such cottage interiors as we glimpsed seemed cleaner 
and cozier than some in Wales; men in wide flat- 
brimmed hats sat like statues at the doors, absolutely 
motionless, but there were women bustling in and out 
in their work, and at one place a little girl of ten had 
been left to do the family wash, and was doing it joy- 
ously and spreading the clothes in the dooryard to dry. 
We did not meet with universal favor as we drove by; 
some groups of girls mocked our driver ; when we said 
one of them was pretty he answered that he had seen 
prettier. 

246 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

V.At the entrance to the ruins of the amphitheater 
which forms the tourist's chief excuse for visiting 
Italica the popular manners softened toward us; the 
village children offered to sell us wild narcissus flowers 
and were even willing to take money in charity. They 
followed us into the ruins, much forbidden by the fine, 
toothless old custodian who took possession of us as his 
proper prey and led us through the moldering caverns 
and crumbling tiers of seats which form the amphi- 
theater. Vast blocks, vast hunks, of the masonry are 
broken off from the mass and lie detached, but the mass 
keeps the form and dignity of the original design ; and 
in the lonely fields there it had something august and 
proud beyond any quality of the Arena at Verona or 
the Colosseum at Rome. It is mostly stripped of the 
marble that once faced the interior, and is like some 
monstrous oval shaped out of the earth, but near the 
imperial box lay some white slabs with initials cut in 
them which restored the vision of the " grandeur that 
was Borne " pretty well over the known world when this 
great work was in its prime. Our custodian was quali- 
fied by his toothlessness to lisp like any old Castilian 
the letters that other Andalusians hiss, but my own 
Spanish was so slight and his patois was so dense that 
the best we could do was to establish a polite misunder- 
standing. On this his one word of English, repeated 
as we passed through the subterranean doors, " Lion, 
lion, lion," cast a gleam of intelligence which brightened 
into a vivid community of ideas when we ended in his 
cottage, and he prepared to sell us some of the small 
Roman coins which formed his stock in trade. The 
poor place was beautifully neat, and from his window 
he made us free of a sight of Seville, signally the cathe- 
dral and the Giralda, such as could not be bought for 

money in ISTew York. 

247 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

Then we set out on our return, leaving unvisited to 
the left the church of San Isidoro de Campo, with its 
tombs of Guzman the Good and that Better Lady Dona 
Urraca Osorio, whom Peter the Cruel had burned. I 
say better, because I hold it nobler in Urraca to have re- 
jected the love of a wicked king than in Guzman to have 
let the Moors slay his son rather than surrender a city 
to them. But I could only pay honor to her pathetic 
memory and the memory of that nameless handmaid of 
hers who rushed into the flames to right the garments 
on the form which the wind had blown them away 
from, and so perished with her. We had to take on 
trust from the guide-books all trace of the Roman town 
where the three emperors were born, and whose " pal- 
aces, aqueducts, and temples and circus were magnifi- 
cent." We had bought some of the " coins daily dug 
up," but we intrusted to the elements those " vestiges 
of vestiges " left of Trajan's palaces after an envious 
earthquake destroyed them so lately as 1755. 

The one incident of our return worthy of literature 
was the dramatic triumph of a woman over a man and 
a mule as we saw it exhibited on the parapet of a culvert 
over a dry torrent's bed. It was the purpose of this 
woman, standing on the coping in statuesque relief and 
showing against the sky the comfortable proportions of 
the Spanish housewife, to mount the mule behind the 
man. She waited patiently while the man slowly and 
as we thought faithlessly urged the mule to the parapet ; 
then, when she put out her hands and leaned forward 
to take her seat, the mule inched softly away and left 
her to recover her balance at the risk of a fall on the 
other side. We were too far for anything but the dumb 
show, but there were, no doubt, words which conveyed 
her opinions unmistakably to both man and mule. With 
our hearts in our mouths we witnessed the scene and its 

248 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

repetitions till we could bear it no longer, and we had 
bidden our cabman drive on when with a sudden spring 
the brave woman launched herself semicircularly for- 
ward and descended upon the exact spot which she had 
been aiming at. There solidly established on the mule, 
with her arms fast round the man, she rode off; and 
I do not think any reader of mine would like to 
have been that mule or that man for the rest of the way 
home. 

We met many other mules, much more exemplary, 
in teams of two, three, and four, covered with bells 
and drawing every kind of carryall and stage and omni- 
bus. These vehicles were built when the road was, 
about 1750, and were, like the road, left to the natural 
forces for keeping themselves in repair. The natural 
forces were not wholly adequate in either case, but the 
vehicles were not so thick with dust as the road, be- 
cause they could shake it off. They had each two or 
four passengers seated with the driver ; passengers clus- 
tered over the top and packed the inside, but every 
one was in the joyous mood of people going home for 
the day. In a plaza not far from the Triana bridge 
you may see these decrepit conveyances assembling 
every afternoon for their suburban journeys, and there 
is no more picturesque sight in Seville, more homelike, 
more endearing. Of course, when I say this I leave 
out of the count the bridge over the Guadalquivir at 
the morning or evening hour when it is covered with 
brightly caparisoned donkeys, themselves covered with 
men needing a shave, and gay-kerchiefed women of 
every age, with boys and dogs underfoot, and pedes- 
trians of every kind, and hucksters selling sea-fruit and 
land-fruit and whatever else the stranger would rather 
see than eat. Very little outcry was needed for the 

sale of these things, which in Naples or even in Venice 

249 



FAMILIAE SPANISH TRAVELS 

would have been attended by such vociferation as would 
have sufficed to proclaim a city in flames. 

On a day not long after our expedition to Italica 
we went a drive with a young American friend living 
in Seville, whom I look to for a book about that famous 
city such as I should like to write myself if I had the 
time to live it as he has done. He promised that he 
would show us a piece of the old Koman wall, but he 
showed us ever so much more, beginning with the fore 
court of the conventual church of Santa Paula, where 
we found the afternoon light waiting to illumine for 
us with its tender caress the Luca della Robbia-like 
colored porcelain figures of the portal and the beauti- 
ful octagon tower staying a moment before taking flight 
for heaven: the most exquisite moment of our whole 
fortnight in Seville. Tall pots of flowers stood round, 
and the grass came green through the crevices of the 
old foot-worn pavement. When we passed out a small 
boy scuffled for our copper with the little girl who 
opened the gate for us, but was brought to justice by 
us, and joined cheerfully in the chorus of children 
chanting " Mo-ney, mo-ney !" round us, but no more 
expecting an answer to their prayer than if we had been 
saints off the church door. 

We passed out of the city by a gate where in a little 
coign of vantage a cobbler was thoughtfully hammering 
away in the tumult at a shoe-sole, and then suddenly on 
our right we had the Julian wall : not a mere fragment, 
but a good long stretch of it. The Moors had built upon 
it and characterized it, but had not so masked it as to 
hide the perdurable physiognomy of the Roman work. 
It was vastly more Roman wall than you see at Rome; 
but far better than this heroic image of war and waste 
was the beautiful old aqueduct, perfectly Roman still, 
with no visible touch from Moor, or from Christian 

250 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

before or after the Moor, and performing its beneficent 
use after two thousand years as effectively as in the 
years before Christ came to bless the peacemakers. 
Nine miles from its mountain source the graceful arches 
bring the water on their shoulders; and though there 
is now an English company that pipes other streams to 
the city through its underground mains, the Roman 
aqueduct, eternally sublime in its usefulness, is con- 
stant to the purpose of the forgotten men who imagined 
it. The outer surfaces of the channel which it lifted 
to the light and air were tagged with weeds and im- 
memorial mosses, and dripped as with the sweat of its 
twenty-centuried toil. 

\We followed it as far as it went on our way to a 
modern work of peace and use which the ancient friend 
and servant of man would feel no unworthy rival. Be- 
yond the drives and gardens of the Delicias, where we 
lingered our last to look at the pleasurers haunting 
them, we drove far across the wheat-fields where a ship- 
canal five miles long is cutting to rectify the curve of 
the Guadalquivir and bring Seville many miles nearer 
the sea than it has ever been before ; hitherto the tramp 
steamers have had to follow the course of the ships 
of Tarshish in their winding approach. The canal is 
the notion of the young king of Spain, and the work 
on it goes forward night and day. The electric lights 
were shedding their blinding glare on the deafening 
clatter of the excavating machinery, and it was an un- 
worthy relief to escape from the intense modernity of 
the scene to that medieval retreat nearer the city where 
the aficionados night-long watch the bulls coming up 
from their pastures for the fight or the feast, whichever 
you choose to call it, of the morrow. These amateurs, 
whom it would be rude to call sports, lurk in the way- 
side cafe over their cups of chocolate and wait till in 
17 251 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

that darkest hour before dawn, with irregular trampling 
and deep bellowing, these hapless heroes of the arena 
pass on to their doom. It is a great thing for the 
aficionados who may imagine in that bellowing the 
the gladiator's hail of Morituri salutant. At any rate, 
it is very chic ; it gives a man standing in Seville, which 
disputes with Madrid the primacy in bull-feasting. If 
the national capital has bull-feasting every Sunday of 
the year, all the famous torreros come from Anda- 
lusia, with the bulls, their brave antagonists, and in the 
great provincial capital there are bull-feasts of insur- 
passable, if not incomparable, splendor. 

Before our pleasant drive ended we passed, as we 
had already passed several times, the scene of the fa- 
mous Feria of Seville, the cattle show which draws tens 
of thousands to the city every springtime for business 
and pleasure, but mostly pleasure. The Feria focuses 
in its greatest intensity at one of the entrances to the 
Delicias, where the street is then so dense with every 
sort of vehicle that people can cross it only by the 
branching viaduct, which rises in two several ascents 
from each footway, intersecting at top and delivering 
their endless multitudes on the opposite sidewalk. 
Along the street are gay pavilions and cottages where 
the nobility live through the Feria with their families 
and welcome the public to the sight of their revelry 
through the open doors and windows. Then, if ever, 
the stranger may see the dancing, and hear the singing 
and playing which all the other year in Seville dis- 
appoints him of. 



VIII 



On the eve of All Saints, after we had driven over 
the worst road in the world outside of Spain or Amer- 

252 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

ica, we arrived at the entrance of the cemetery where 
Baedeker had mysteriously said " some sort of fair was 
held." Then we perceived that we were present at the 
preparations for celebrating one of the most affecting 
events of the Spanish year. This was the visit of kin- 
dred and friends bringing tokens of remembrance and 
affection to the dead. The whole long, rough way we 
had passed them on foot, and at the cemetery gate we 
found them arriving in public cabs, as well as in private 
carriages, with the dignity and gravity of smooth-shaven 
footmen and coachmen. In Spain these functionaries 
look their office more solemnly even than in England 
and affect you as peculiarly correct and eighteenth- 
century. But apart from their looks the occasion 
seemed more a festivity than a solemnity. The people 
bore flowers, mostly artificial, as well as lanterns, and 
within the cemetery they were furbishing up the monu- 
ments with every appliance according to the material, 
scrubbing the marble, whitewashing the stucco, and re- 
painting the galvanized iron. The lanterns were made 
to match the monuments and fences architecturally, and 
the mourners were attaching them with a gentle satis- 
faction in their fitness; I suppose they were to be 
lighted at dark and to burn through the night. There 
were men among the mourners, but most of them were 
women and children; some were weeping, like a father 
leading his two little ones, and an old woman grieving 
for her dead with tears. But what prevailed was a com- 
munity of quiet resignation, almost to the sort of cheer- 
fulness which bereavement sometimes knows. The 
scene was tenderly affecting, but it had a tremendous 
touch of tragic setting in the long, straight avenue of 
black cypresses which slimly climbed the upward slope 
from the entrance to the farther bound of the cemetery. 
Otherwise there was only the patience of entire faith 

253 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

in this annually recurring visit of the living to the 
dead: the fixed belief that these should rise from the 
places where they lay. and they who survived them for 
yet a little more of time should join them from what- 
ever end of the earth in the morning of the Last Day. 

All along I have been shirking what any right- 
minded traveler would feel almost his duty, but I now 
own that there is a museum in Seville, the Museo Pro- 
vincial, which was of course once a convent and is now 
a gallery, with the best, but not the very best, Murillos 
in it, not to speak of the best Zurburans. I will not 
speak at all of those pictures, because I could in no wise 
say what they were, or were like, and because I would 
not have the reader come to them with any opinions of 
mine which he might bring away with him in the belief 
that they were his own. Let him not fail to go to the 
museum, however; he will be the poorer beyond cal- 
culation if he does not; but he will be a beggar if he 
does not go to the Hospital de la Caridad, where in the 
church he will find six Murillos out-Murilloing any 
others excepting always the incomparable " Vision of 
St. Anthony " in the cathedral. We did not think of 
those six Murillos when we went to the hospital; we 
knew nothing of the peculiar beauty and dignity of the 
church ; but we came because we wished to see what the 
repentance of a man could do for others after a youth 
spent in wicked riot. The gentle, pensive little Mother 
who received us carefully said at once that the hospital 
was not for the sick, but only for the superannuated 
and the poor and friendless who came to pass a night 
or an indefinite time in it, according to the pressure 
of their need; and after showing us the rich little 
church, she led us through long, clean corridors where 
old men lay in their white beds or sat beside them eat- 
ing their breakfasts, very savory-looking, out of ample 

254 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

white bowls. Some of them saluted us, but the others 
we excused because they were so preoccupied. In a 
special room set apart for them were what we brutally 
call tramps, but who doubtless are known in Spain for 
indigent brethren overtaken on their wayfaring with- 
out a lodging for the night. Here they could come for 
it and cook their supper and breakfast at the large cir- 
cular fireplace which filled one end of their room. They 
rose at our entrance and bowed; and how I wish I 
could have asked them, every one, about their lives ! 

1 There was nothing more except the doubt of that dear 
little Mother when I gave her a silver dollar for 
her kindness. She seemed surprised and worried, and 
asked, " Is it for the charity or for me ?" What could 
I do but answer, " Oh,. for your Grace," and add an- 
other for the charity. She still looked perplexed, but 
there was no way out of our misunderstanding, if it 
was one, and we left her with her sweet, troubled face 
between the white wings of her cap, like angel's wings 
mounting to it from her shoulders. Then we went to 
look at the statue of the founder bearing a hapless 
stranger in his arms in a space of flowers before the 
hospital, where a gardener kept watch that no visitor 
should escape without a bunch worth at least a peseta. 
He had no belief that the peseta could possibly be for 
the charity, and the poverty of the poor neighborhood 
was so much relieved by the mere presence of the hos- 
pital that it begged of us very little as we passed 
through. 



IX 



We had expected to go to Granada after a weeE in: 
Seville, but man is always proposing beyond his dis- 
posing in strange lands as well as at home, and we 

255 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

were fully a fortnight in the far lovelier capital. In 
the mean time we had changed from our rooms in the 
rear of the hotel to others in the front, where we entered 
intimately into the life of the Plaza San Fernando as 
far as we might share it from our windows. It was 
not very active life; even the cabmen whose neat vic- 
torias bordered the place on three sides were not eager 
for custom; they invited the stranger, but they did not 
urge; there was a continual but not a rapid passing 
through the ample oblong ; there was a good deal of still 
life on the benches where leisure enjoyed the feathery 
shadow of the palms, for the sun was apt to be too hot 
at the hour of noon, though later it conduced to the 
slumber which in Spain accompanies the digestion of 
the midday meal in all classes. As the afternoon ad- 
vanced numbers of little girls came into the plaza and 
played children's games which seemed a translation of 
games familiar to our own country. One evening a 
small boy was playing with them, but after a while he 
seemed to be found unequal to the sport ; he was ejected 
from the group and went off gloomily to grieve apart 
with his little thumb in his mouth. The sight of his 
dignified desolation was insupportable, and we tried 
what a copper of the big-dog value would do to comfort 
him. He took it without looking up and ran away to 
the peanut-stand which is always steaming at the first 
corner all over Christendom. Late in the evening — in 
fact, after the night had fairly fallen — we saw him 
making his way into a house fronting on the plaza. He 
tried at the door with one hand and in the other he 
held an unexhausted bag of peanuts. He had wasted 
no word of thanks on us, and he did not now. When 
he got the door open he backed into the interior still 
facing us and so fading from our sight and knowledge. 

He had the touch of comedv which makes pathos 
256 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

endurable, but another incident was wholly pathetic. 
As we came out of an antiquity shop near the cathedral 
one afternoon we found on the elevated footway near 
the Gate of Pardon a mother and daughter, both of 
the same second youth, who gently and jointly pro- 
nounced to us the magical word encajes. Rather, they 
questioned us with it, and they only suggested, very 
forbearingly, that we should come to their house with 
them to see those laces, which of course were old laces ; 
their house was quite near. But that one of us twain 
who was singly concerned in encajes had fatigued and 
perhaps overbought herself at the antiquity shop, and 
she signified a regret which they divined too well was 
dissent. They looked rather than expressed a keen 
little disappointment; the mother began a faint insist- 
ence, but the daughter would not suffer it. Here was 
the pride of poverty, if not poverty itself, and it was 
with a pang that we parted from these mutely appealing 
ladies. We could not have borne it if we had not in- 
stantly promised ourselves to come the next day and 
meet them and go home with them and buy all their 
encajes that we had money for. We kept our promise, 
and we came the next day and the next and every day 
we remained in Seville, and lingered so long that we 
implanted in the cabmen beside the curbing the inex- 
tinguishable belief that we were in need of a cab; but 
we never saw those dear ladies again. 
v These are some of the cruel memories which the 
happiest travel leaves, and I gratefully recall that in 
the case of a custodian of the Columbian Museum, 
which adjoins the cathedral, we did not inflict a pang 
that rankled in our hearts for long. I gave him a 
handful of copper coins which I thought made up a 
peseta, but his eyes were keener, and a sorrow gloomed 

his brow which projected its shadow so darkly over 

257 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

us when we went into the cathedral for one of our 
daily looks that we hastened to return and make up 
the full peseta with another heap of coppers; a whole 
sunburst of smiles illumined his face, and a rainbow 
of the brightest colors arched our sky and still arches 
it whenever we think of that custodian and his re- 
habilitated trust in man. 

This seems the crevice where I can crowd in the fact 
that bits of family wash hung from the rail of the old 
pulpit in the Court of Oranges beside the cathedral, 
and a pumpkin vine lavishly decorated an arcade near 
a doorway which perhaps gave into the dwelling of that 
very custodian. At the same time I must not fail to 
urge the reader's seeing the Columbian Museum, which 
is richly interesting and chiefly for those Latin and 
Italian authors annotated by the immortal admiral's 
own hand. These give the American a sense of him as 
the discoverer of our hemisphere which nothing else 
could, and insurpassably render the !New World cred- 
ible. At the same time they somehow bring a lump of 
pity and piety into the throat at the thought of the 
things he did and suffered. They bring him from his- 
tory and make him at home in the beholder's heart, 
and there seems a mystical significance in the fact that 
the volume most abounding in marginalia should be 
Seneca s Prophecies. 

The frequent passing of men as well as women and 
children through our Plaza San Fernando and the 
prevalence of men asleep on the benches ; the immense 
majority of boys everywhere ; the moralized abattoir 
outside the walls where the humanity dormant at the 
bull-feast wakes to hide every detail of slaughter for 
the market ; a large family of cats basking at their ease 
in a sunny doorway; trains of milch goats with wicker 
muzzles, led by a milch cow from door to door through 



258 






SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

the streets ; the sudden solemn beauty of the high altar 
in the cathedral, seen by chance on a brilliant day; 
the bright, inspiriting air of Seville ; a glorious glimpse 
of the Giralda coming home from a drive; the figure 
of a girl outlined in a lofty window; a middle-aged 
Finnish, pair trying to give themselves in murmured 
talk to the colored stucco of the Hall of the Ambassadors 
in what seems their wedding journey; two artists work- 
ing near with sketches tilted against the wall ; a large 
American lady who arrives one forenoon in traveling 
dress and goes out after luncheon in a mantilla with a 
fan and high comb; another American lady who ap- 
pears after dinner in the costume of a Spanish dancing- 
girl ; the fact that there is no Spanish butter and that 
the only good butter comes from France and the pass- 
able butter from Denmark; the soft long veils of pink 
cloud that trail themselves in the sky across our Plaza, 
and then dissolve in the silvery radiance of the gibbous 
moon ; the yellowish-red electric Brush lights swinging 
from palm to palm as in the decoration of some vast 
ballroom; a second drive through Triana, and a fail- 
ure to reach the church we set out for; the droves of 
brown pigs and flocks of brown sheep; the goatherds 
unloading olive boughs in the fields for the goats to 
browse; a dirty, kind, peaceful village, with an Eng- 
lish factory in it, and a mansion of galvanized iron 
with an automobile before it; a pink villa on a hill- 
side and a family group on the shoulder of a high- 
walled garden ; a girl looking down from the wall, and 
a young man resting his hand on the masonry and look- 
ing up at her; the good faces of the people, men and 
women; boys wrestling and frolicking in the village 
streets; the wide dust-heap of a road, full of sudden 
holes; the heat of the sun in the first November week 
after touches of cold; the tram-cars that wander from 

259 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

one side of the city street to the other, and then barely 
miss scraping the house walls ; in our drive home from 
our failure for that church, men with trains of oxen 
plowing and showing against the round red rayless 
sun; a stretch of the river with the crimson-hulled 
steamers, and a distant sail-boat seen across the fields; 
the gray moon that burnishes itself and rides bright and 
high for our return; people in balconies, and the air 
full of golden dust shot with bluish electric lights ; here 
is a handful of suggestions from my note-book which 
each and every one would expand into a chapter or a 
small volume under the intensive culture which the 
reader may well have come to dread. But I fling them 
all down here for him to do what he likes with, and 
turn to speak at more length of the University, or, 
rather the University Church, which I would not have 
any reader of mine fail to visit. 



With my desire to find likeness rather than difference 
in strange peoples, I was glad to have two of the stu- 
dents loitering in the patio play just such a trick on a 
carter at the gate as school-boys might play in our own 
land. While his back was turned they took his whip 
and hid it and duly triumphed in his mystification and 
dismay. We did not wait for the catastrophe, but by 
the politeness of another student found the booth of the 
custodian, who showed us to the library. A noise of 
recitation from the windows looking into the patio fol- 
lowed us up-stairs; but maturer students were reading 
at tables in the hushed library, and at a large central 
table a circle of grave authorities of some sort were 

smoking the air blue with their cigarettes. One, who 

260 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

seemed chief among them, rose and bowed us into the 
freedom of the place, and again rose and bowed when 
we went out. We did not stay long, for a library is of 
the repellent interest of a wine-cellar; unless the books 
or bottles are broached it is useless to linger. There 
are eighty thousand volumes in that library, but we 
had to come away without examining half of them. 
The church was more appreciable, and its value was 
enhanced to us by the reluctance of the stiff old sacristan 
to unlock it. We found it rich in a most wonderful 
retablo carved in wood and painted. Besides the ex- 
cellent pictures at the high altar, there are two portrait 
brasses which were meant to be recumbent, but which 
are stood up against the wall, perhaps to their surprise, 
without loss of impressiveness. Most notable of all is 
the mural tomb of Pedro Enriquez de Eibera and his 
wife : he who built the Casa de Pilatos, and as he had 
visited the Holy Land was naturally fabled to have 
copied it from the House of Pilate. Now, as if still 
continuing his travels, he reposes with his wife in a 
sort of double-decker monument, where the Evil One 
would have them suggest to the beholder the notion of 
passengers in the upper and lower berths of a Pullman 
sleeper. 

Of all the Spanish cities that I saw, Seville was the 
most charming, not for those attributive blandishments 
of the song and dance which the tourist is supposed to 
find it, but which we quite failed of, but for the simpler 
and less conventional amiabilities which she was so rich 
in. I have tried to hint at these, but really one must 
go to Seville for them and let them happen as they 
will. Many happened in our hotel where we liked 
everybody, from the kindly, most capable Catalonian 
head waiter to the fine-headed little NTapoleonic-looking 

waiter who had identified us at San Sebastian as Ameri- 

261 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

cans, because we spoke " quicklier " than the English, 
and who ran to us when we came into the hotel and 
shook hands with us as if we were his oldest and dear- 
est friends. There was a Swiss concierge who could 
not be bought for money, and the manager was the 
mirror of managers. Fancy the landlord of the Wal- 
dorf-Astoria, or the St. Eegis, coming out on the side- 
walk and beating down a taxicabman from a charge of 
fifteen pesetas to six for a certain drive! It is not 
thinkable, and yet the like of it happened to us in 
Seville from our manager. It was not his fault, when 
our rear apartment became a little too chill, and we 
took a parlor in the front and came back on the first 
day hoping to find it stored full of the afternoon sun's 
warmth, but found that the camerera had opened the 
windows and closed the shutters in our absence so that 
our parlor was of a frigidity which no glitter of the 
electric light could temper. The halls and public rooms 
were chill in anticipation and remembrance of any 
cold outside, but in our parlor there was a hole for the 
sort of stove which we saw in the reading-room, twice 
as large as an average teakettle, with a pipe as big 
around as the average rain-pipe. I am sure this ap- 
paratus would have heated us admirably, but the 
weather grew milder and milder and we never had 
occasion to make the successful experiment. Mean- 
while the moral atmosphere of the hotel was of a bland- 
ness which would have gone far to content us with any 
meteorological perversity. When we left it we were on 
those human terms with every one who ruled or served 
in it which one never attains in an American hotel, and 
rarely in an English one. 

At noon on the 4th of November the sun was really 
hot in our plaza; but we were instructed that before 

the winter was over there would be cold enough, not 

262 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

of great frosty severity, of course, but nasty and hard 
to bear in the summer conditions which prevail through 
the year. I wish I could tell how the people live then 
in their beautiful, cool houses, but I do not know, and 
I do not know how they live at any season except from 
the scantiest hearsay. The women remain at home ex- 
cept when they go to church or to drive in the Delicias 
— that is to say, the women of society, of the nobility. 
There is no society in our sense among people of the 
middle classes ; the men when they are not at business 
are at the cafe ; the women when they are not at mass 
are at home. That is what we were told, and yet at a 
moving-picture show we saw many women of the middle 
as well as the lower classes. The frequent holidays 
afford them an outlet, and indoors they constantly see 
their friends and kindred at their tertulias. 
xThe land is in large holdings which are managed 
by the factors or agents of the noble proprietors. These, 
when they are not at Madrid, are to be found at their 
clubs, where their business men bring them papers to 
be signed, often unread. This sounds a little romantic, 
and perhaps it is not true. Some gentlemen take a great 
interest in the bull-feasts and breed the bulls and cul- 
tivate the bull-fighters; what other esthetic interests 
they have I do not know. All classes are said to be 
of an Oriental philosophy of life; they hold that the 
English striving and running to and fro and seeing 
strange countries comes in the end to the same thing 
as sitting still; and why should they bother? There 
is something in that, but one may sit still too much; 
the Spanish ladies, as I many times heard, do overdo 
it. Not only they do not walk abroad ; they do not 
walk at home ; everything is carried to and from them ; 
they do not lift hand or foot. The consequence is that 
they have very small hands and feet; Gautier, who 

263 



FAMILIAE SPANISH TRAVELS 

seems to have grown tired when he reached Seville, 
and has comparatively little to say of it, says that a 
child may hold a Sevillian lady's foot in its hand; he 
does not say he saw it done. What is true is that no 
child could begin to clasp with both hands the waist 
of an average Sevillian lady. But here again the rule 
has its exceptions and will probably have more. Not 
only is the English queen-consort stimulating the Anda- 
lusian girls to play tennis by her example when she 
comes to Seville, but it has somehow become the fashion 
for ladies of all ages to leave their carriages in the 
Delicias and walk up and down ; we saw at least a dozen 
doing it. 

Whatever flirting and intriguing goes on, the public 
sees nothing of it. In the street there is no gleam of 
sheep's-eying or any manner of indecorum. The women 
look sensible and good, and I should say the same of 
the men ; the stranger's experience must have been more 
unfortunate than mine if he has had any unkindness 
from them. One heard that Spanish women do not 
smoke, unless they are cigarreras and work in the 
large tobacco factory, where the " Carmen " tradition 
has given place to the mother-of-a-family type, with 
her baby on the floor beside her. Even these may pre- 
fer not to set the baby a bad example and have her grow 
up and smoke like those English and American women. 
The strength of the Church is, of course, in the 
women's faith, and its strength is unquestionable, if 
not quite unquestioned. In Seville, as I have said, there 
are two Spanish Protestant churches, and their worship 
is not molested. Society does not receive their mem- 
bers; but we heard that with most Spanish people 
Protestantism is a puzzle rather than offense. They 
know we are not Jews, but Christians ; yet we are not 
Catholics; and what, then, are we? With the Protes- 

264 



SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS 

tants, as with the Catholics, there is always religious 
marriage. There is civil marriage for all, but without 
the religious rite the pair are not well seen by either 
sect. 

1 It is said that the editor of the ablest paper in 
Madrid, which publishes a local edition at Seville, is 
a Protestant. The queen mother is extremely clerical, 
though one of the wisest and best women who ever 
ruled; the king and queen consort are as liberal as 
possible, and the king is notoriously a democrat, with 
a dash of Haroun al Rashid. He likes to take his 
governmental subordinates unawares, and a story is 
told of his dropping in at the post-office on a late visit 
to Seville, and asking for the chief. Hje was out, and 
so were all the subordinate officials down to the lowest, 
whom the king found at his work. The others have 
since been diligent at theirs. The story is characteristic 
of the king, if not of the post-office people. 

Political freedom is almost grotesquely unrestricted. 
In our American republic we should scarcely tolerate a 
party in favor of a monarchy, but in the Spanish mon- 
archy a republican party is recognized and represented. 
It holds public meetings and counts among its members 
many able and distinguished men, such as the novelist 
Perez Galdos, one of the most brilliant novelists not 
only in Spain but in Europe. With this unbounded 
liberty in Andalusia, it is said that the Spaniards of 
the north are still more radical. 

' Though the climate is most favorable for consump- 
tives, the habits of the people are so unwholesome that 
tuberculosis prevails, and there are two or three deaths 
a day from it in Seville. There is no avoidance of 
tuberculous suspects; they cough, and the men spit 
everywhere in the streets and on the floors and carpets 

of the clubs. The women suffer for want of fresh air, 

265 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

though now with the example of the English queen be- 
fore them and the young girls who used to lie abed till 
noon getting up early ta play tennis, it will be dif- 
ferent. Their mothers and aunts still drive to the 
Delicias to prove that they have carriages, but when 
there they alight and walk up and down by their doctor's 
advice. 

I only know that during our fortnight in Seville I 
suffered no wound to a sensibility which has been kept 
in full repair for literary, if not for humanitarian 
purposes. The climate was as kind as the people. It 
is notorious that in summer the heat is that of a furnace, 
but even then it is bearable because it is a dry heat, 
like that of our indoor furnaces. The 5th of Novem- 
ber was our last day, and then it was too hot for com- 
fort in the sun, but one is willing to find the November 
sun too hot; it is an agreeable solecism; and I only 
wish that we could have found the sun too hot during 
the next three days in Granada. If the 5th of Novem- 
ber had been worse for heat than it was it must still 
remain dear in our memory, because in the afternoon 
we met once more these Chilians of our hearts whom 
we had met in San Sebastian and Burgos and Vallado- 
lid and Madrid. We knew we should meet them in 
Seville and were not the least surprised. They were 
as glad and gay as ever, and in our common polyglot 
they possessed us of the fact that they had just com- 
pleted the eastern hemicycle of their Peninsular tour. 
They were latest from Malaga, and now they were going 
northward. It was our last meeting, but better friends 
I could not hope to meet again, whether in the Old 
World or the New, or that Other World which we hope 
will somehow be the summation of all that is best in 
both. 



XI 
TO AND m GKANADA 

The train which leaves Seville at ten of a sunny 
morning is supposed to arrive in Granada at seven of 
a moonlight evening. This is a mistake ; the moonlight 
is on time, hut the train arrives at a quarter of nine. 
Still, if the day has been sunny the whole way and 
the moonlight is there at the end, no harm has really 
been done ; and measurably the promise of the train has 
been kept. 



\There was not a moment of the long journey over 
the levels of Andalusia which was not charming ; when 
it began to be over the uplands of the last Moorish 
kingdom, it was richly impressive. The only thing 
that I can remember against the landscape is the preva- 
lence of olive orchards. I hailed as a relief the stubble- 
fields immeasurably spread at times, and I did not al- 
ways resent the roadside planting of some sort of tall 
hedges which now and then hid the olives. But olive 
orchards may vary their monotony by the spectacle of 
peasants on ladders gathering their fruit into wide- 
mon tlied sacks, and occasionally their ranks of sym- 
metrical green may be broken by the yellow and red of 
poplars and pomegranates around the pleasant farm- 
steads. The nearer we drew to Granada the pleasanter 
18 267 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

these grew, till in the famous Vega they thickly dotted 
the landscape with their brown roofs and white walls. 

We had not this effect till we had climbed the first 
barrier of hills and began to descend on the thither side ; 
but we had incident enough to keep us engaged without 
the picturesqueness. The beggars alone, who did not 
fail us at any station, were enough ; for what could the 
most exacting tourist ask more than to be eating his 
luncheon under the eyes of the children who besieged 
his car windows and protested their famine in accents 
which would have melted a heart of stone or of anything 
less obdurate than travel ? We had always our brace 
of Civil Guards, who preserved us from bandits, but 
they left the beggars unmolested by getting out on the 
train next the station and pacing the platform, while 
the rabble of hunger thronged us on the other side. 
There was especially a boy who, after being compas- 
sionated in money for his misfortune, continued to fling 
his wooden leg into the air and wave it at our window 
by some masterly gymnastics ; and there was another 
boy who kept lamenting that he had no mother, till, 
having duly feed and fed him, I suggested, " But you 
have a father ?" Then, as if he had never seen the case 
in that light before, he was silent, and presently went 
away without further insistence on his bereavement. 

The laconic fidelity of my note-book enables me to 

recall here that the last we saw of Seville was the 

Cathedral and the Giralda, which the guide-books had 

promised us we should see first; that we passed some 

fields of alfalfa which the Moors had brought from 

Africa and the Spanish have carried to America ; that 

in places men were plowing and that the plowed land 

was red ; that the towns on the uplands in the distance 

Were white and not gray, or mud-colored, as in Castile ; 

268 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

that the morning sky was blue, with thin, pale clouds ; 
that the first station out was charmingly called Two 
Brothers, and that the loungers about it were plain, 
but kind-looking men-folk with good faces, some actual- 
ly clean-shaven, and a woman with a white rose in her 
hair; that Two Brothers is a suburb of Seville, fre- 
quented in the winter, and has orange orchards about 
it; that farther on at one place the green of the fields 
spread up to the walls of a white farm with a fine sense 
of color ; that there were hawks sailing in the blue air ; 
that there were grotesque hedges of cactus and piles of 
crooked cactus logs; that there were many eucalyptus 
trees; that there were plantations of young olives, as 
if never to let that all-pervading industry perish; that 
there were irregular mountain ranges on the right, but 
never the same kind of scenery on both sides of the 
track; that there was once a white cottage on a yellow 
hill and a pink villa with two towers ; that there was a 
solitary fig tree near the road, and that there were vast 
lonely fields when there were not olive orchards. 

\ Taking breath after one o'clock, much restored by our 
luncheon, my note-book remembers a gray-roofed, yel- 
low-walled town, very suitable for a water-color, and 
just beyond it the first vineyard we had come to. Then 
there were pomegranate trees, golden-leaved, and tall 
poplars pollarded plume fashion as in southern France ; 
and in a field a herd of brown pigs feeding, which com- 
mended itself to observance, doubtless, as color in some 
possible word-painting. There now abounded pome- 
granates, figs, young corn, and more and more olives; 
and as if the old olives and young olives were not 
enough, the earth began to be pitted with holes dug 
for the olives which had not yet been planted. 

269 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 



ii 



At Bobadilla, the junction where an English rail- 
way company begins to get in its work and to animate 
the Spanish environment to unwonted enterprise, there 
was a varied luncheon far past our capacity. But when 
a Cockney voice asked over my shoulder, " Tea, sir ?" 
I gladly closed with the proposition. " But you've put 
hot milk into it I" I protested. " I know it, sir. We 
'ave no cold milk at Bobadilla," and instantly a baleful 
suspicion implanted itself which has since grown into 
a upas tree of poisonous conviction : goat's milk does 
not keep well, and it was not only hot milk, but hot 
goafs milk which they were serving us at Bobadilla. 
However, there were admirable ham sandwiches, not of 
goat's flesh, at the other end of the room, and with 
these one could console oneself. There was also a com- 
mendable pancake whose honored name I never knew, 
but whose acquaintance I should be sorry not to have 
made; and all about Bobadilla there was an agreeable 
bustle, which we enjoyed the more when we had made 
sure that we had changed into the right train for Gra- 
nada and found in our compartment the charming 
young Swedish couple who had come with us from 
Seville. 

Thoroughly refreshed by the tea with hot goat's milk 
in it, by the genuine ham sandwiches and the pancakes, 
my note-book takes up the tale once more. It dwells 
upon the rich look of the land and the comfort of the 
farms contrasting with the wild irregularity of the 
mountain ranges which now began to serrate the hori- 
zon; and I have no doubt that if I had then read that 
most charming of all Washington Irving's Spanish 
studies, the story, namelv, of his journey over quite 

270 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

the same way we had come seventy-five years later, my 
note-book would abound in lively comment on the 
changed aspect of the whole landscape. Even as it is, 
I find it exclamatory over the wonder of the mountain 
coloring which it professes to have found green, brown, 
red, gray, and blue, but whether all at once or not it 
does not say. It is more definite as to the plain we 
were traversing, with its increasing number of white 
cottages, cheerfully testifying to the distribution of the 
land in small holdings, so different from the vast estates 
abandoned to homeless expanses of wheat-fields and 
olive orchards which we had been passing through. 
It did not appear on later inquiry that these small 
holdings were of peasant ownership, as I could have 
wished; they were tenant farms, but their neatness 
testified to the prosperity of the tenants, and their fre- 
quency cheered our way as the evening waned and the 
lamps began to twinkle from their windows. At a 
certain station, I am reminded by my careful mentor, 
the craggy mountain-tops were softened by the sun- 
set pink, and that then the warm afternoon air began 
to grow cooler, and the dying day to empurple the up- 
lands everywhere without abating the charm of the 
blithe cottages. It seems to have been mostly a very 
homelike scene, and where there was a certain stretch 
of woodland its loneliness was relieved by the antic feat 
of a goat lifting itself on its hind legs to browse the 
olive leaves on their native bough. The air was thinner 
and cooler, but never damp, and at times it relented 
and blew lullingly in at our window. We made such 
long stops that the lights began to fade out of the farm 
windows, but kept bright in the villages, when at a 
station which we were so long in coming to that we 
thought it must be next to Granada, a Spanish gentle- 
man got in with us ; and though the prohibitory notice 

271 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

of No Fumadores stared him in the face, it did not 
stare him out of countenance ; for he continued to smoke 
like a locomotive the whole way to our journey's end. 
From time to time I meditated a severe rebuke, but 
in the end I made him none, and I am now convinced 
that this was wise, for he probably would not have 
minded it, and as it was, when I addressed him some 
commonplace as to the probable time of our arrival he 
answered in the same spirit, and then presently grew 
very courteously communicative. He told me for one 
thing, after we had passed the mountain gates of the 
famous Vega and were making our way under the moon- 
light over the storied expanse, drenched with the blood 
of battles long ago, that the tall chimneys we began to 
see blackening the air with their volumed fumes were 
the chimneys of fourteen beet-root sugar factories be- 
longing to the Duke of Wellington. Then I divined, 
as afterward I learned, that the lands devoted to this 
industry were part of the rich gift which Spain be- 
stowed upon the Great Duke in gratitude for his ser- 
vices against the ^Napoleonic invasion. His present heir 
has imagined a benevolent use of his heritage by in- 
viting the peasantry of the Vega to the culture of the 
sugar-beet; but whether the enterprise was prospering 
I could not say; and I do not suppose any reader of 
mine will care so much for it as I did in the pour of 
the moonlight over the roofs and towers that were now 
becoming Granada, and quickening my slow old emo- 
tions to a youthful glow. At the station, which, in 
spite of Boabdil el Chico and Ferdinand and Isabel, 
was quite like every other railway station of southern 
Europe, we parted friends with our Spanish fellow- 
traveler, whom we left smoking and who is probably 
smoking still. Then we mounted with our Swedish 

friends into the omnibus of the hotel we had chosen 

272 






TO AND IN GRANADA 

and which began, after discreet delays, to climb the hill 
town toward the Alhambra through a commonplace- 
looking town gay with the lights of cafes and shops, and 
to lose itself in the more congenial darkness of narrower 
streets barred with moonlight. It was drawn by four 
mules, covered with bells and constantly coaxed and 
cursed by at least two drivers on the box, while a vigor- 
ous boy ran alongside and lashed their legs without 
ceasing till we reached the shelf where our hotel 
perched. 



in 



I had taken the precaution to write for rooms, and we 
got the best in the house, or if not that then the best we 
could wish at a price which I could have wished much 
less, till we stepped out upon our balcony, and looked 
down and over the most beautiful, the most magnifi- 
cent scene that eyes, or at least my eyes, ever dwelt on. 
Beside us and before us the silver cup of the Sierra 
Nevada, which held the city in its tiled hollow, poured 
it out over the immeasurable Vega washed with moon- 
shine which brightened and darkened its spread in a 
thousand radiances and obscurities of windows and 
walls and roofs and trees and lurking gardens. Be- 
cause it was unspeakable we could not speak, but I may 
say now that this was our supreme moment of Granada. 
There were other fine moments, but none unmixed with 
the reservations which truth obliges honest travel to 
own. Now, when from some secret spot there rose the 
wild cry of a sentinel, and prolonged itself to another 
who caught it dying up and breathed new life into it 
and sent it echoing on till it had made the round of 
the whole fairy city, the heart shut with a pang of pure 

ecstasy. One could bear no more; we stepped within, 

273 



FAMILIAE SPANISH TRAVELS 

and closed the window behind us. That is, we tried 
to close it, but it would not latch, and we were obliged 
to ring for a camerero to come and see what ailed it. 

\The infirmity of the door-latch was emblematic of a 
temperamental infirmity in the whole hotel. The prom- 
ises were those of Madrid, but the performances were 
those of Segovia. There was a glitter, almost a glare, 
of Ritz-like splendor, and the rates were Ritz-like, but 
there the resemblance ceased. The porter followed us 
to our rooms on our arrival and told us in excellent 
English (which excelled less and less throughout our 
stay) that he was the hall porter and that we could 
confidently refer all our wants to him ; but their refer- 
ence seemed always to close the incident. There was 
a secretary who assured us that our rooms were not 
dear, and who could not out of regard to our honor and 
comfort consider cheaper ones; and then ceased to be 
until he receipted our bill when we went away. There 
was a splendid dining-room with waiters of such beauty 
and dignity, and so purple from clean shaving, that we 
scarcely dared face them, and there were luncheons 
and dinners of rich and delicate superabundance in the 
menu, but of an exquisite insipidity on the palate, and 
of a swiftly vanishing Barmecide insubstantiality, as 
if they were banquets from the Arabian Nights im- 
agined under the rule of the Moors. Everywhere shone 
silver-bright radiators, such as we had not seen since we 
left their like freezing in Burgos; but though the 
weather presently changed from an Andalusian softness 
to a Castilian severity after a snowfall in the Sierra, 
the radiators remained insensible to the difference and 
the air nipped the nose and fingers wherever one went 
in the hotel. The hall porter, who knew everything, 
said the boilers were out of order, and a traveler who 

had been there the winter before confirmed him with 

274 







THE GATE OF JUSTICE. PRINCIPAL ENTRANCE TO THE ALHAMBRA 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

the testimony that they were out of order even in Janu- 
ary. There may not have been any fire under them 
then, as there was none now ; but if they needed repair- 
ing now it was clearly because they needed repairing 
then. In the corner of one of our rooms the frescoed 
plastering had scaled off, and we knew that if we came 
back a year later the same spot would offer us a familiar 
welcome. 

\ But why do I gird at that hotel in Granada as if I 
knew of no faults in American hotels ? I know of many 
and like faults, and I do not know of a single hotel 
of ours with such a glorious outlook and downlook as 
that hotel in Granada. The details which the sunlight 
of the morrow revealed to us when we had mastered the 
mystery of our window-catch and stood again on our 
balcony took nothing from the loveliness of the moon- 
light picture, but rather added to it, and, besides a 
more incredible scene of mountain and plain and city, 
it gave us one particular tree in a garden almost under 
us which my heart clings to still with a rapture chang- 
ing to a fond regret. At first the tree, of what name or 
nature I cannot tell, stood full and perfect, a mass of 
foliage all yellow as if made up of " patines of bright 
gold." Then day by day, almost hour by hour, it dark- 
ened and the tree shrank as if huddling its leaves closer 
about it in the cold that fell from the ever-snowier 
Sierra. On the last morning we left its boughs shak- 
ing in the rain 

against the cold, 
Bare, ruined choir where late the sweet birds sang. 



IV 

But we anticipate, as I should say if I were still a 

romantic novelist. Many other trees in and about Gra- 

1 276 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

nada were yellower than that one, and the air hung 
dim with a thin haze as of Indian summer when we 
left our hotel in eager haste to see the Alhambra such 
as travelers use when they do not want some wonder 
of the world to escape them. Of course there was really 
no need of haste, and we had to wait till our guide 
could borrow a match to light the first of the cigarettes 
which he never ceased to smoke. He was commended 
to us by the hall porter, who said he could speak French, 
and so he could, to the extreme of constantly saying, 
with a wave of his cigarette, " West ce pas t" For the 
rest he helped himself out willingly with my small 
Spanish. At the end he would have delivered us over 
to a dealer in antiquities hard by the gate of the palace 
if I had not prevented him, as it were, by main force ; 
he did not repine, but we were not sorry that he should 
be engaged for the next day. 

\Our way to the gate, which was the famous Gate of 
Justice and was lovely enough to be the Gate of Mercy, 
lay through the beautiful woods, mostly elms, planted 
there by the English early in the last century. The 
birds sang in their tops, and the waters warbled at their 
feet, and it was somewhat thrillingly cold in their dense 
shade, so that we were glad to get out of it, and into the 
sunshine where the old Moorish palace lay basking and 
dreaming. At once let me confide to the impatient 
reader that the whole Alhambra, by which he must 
understand a citadel, and almost a city, since it could, 
if it never did, hold twenty thousand people within its 
walls, is only historically and not artistically more 
Moorish than the Alcazar at Seville. Far nobler and 
more beautiful than its Arabic decorativeness in tinted 
stucco is the palace begun by Charles V., after a de- 
sign in the spirit of the supreme hour of the Italian 

Renaissance. It is not a ruin in its long arrest, and 

276 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

one hears with hopeful sympathy that the Spanish king 
means some day to complete it. To be sure, the world 
is, perhaps, already full enough of royal palaces, but 
since they return sooner or later to the people whose 
pockets they come out of, one must be willing to have 
this palace completed as the architect imagined it. 

We were followed into the Moorish palace by the 
music of three blind minstrels who began to tune their 
guitars as soon as they felt us: see us they could not. 
Then presently we were in the famous Court of the 
Lions, where a group of those beasts, at once archaic 
and puerile in conception, sustained the basin of a 
fountain in the midst of a graveled court arabesqued 
and honeycombed round with the wonted ornamentation 
of the Moors. 

The place was disappointing to the boy in me who 
had once passed so much of his leisure there, and 
had made it all marble and gold. The floor is not 
only gravel, and the lions are not only more like sheep, 
but the environing architecture and decoration are of 
a faded prettiness which cannot bear comparison with 
the fresh rougeing, equally Moorish, of the Alcazar at 
Seville. Was this indeed the place where the Abencer- 
rages were brought in from supper one by one and be- 
headed into the fountain at the behest of their royal 
host ? Was it here that the haughty Don Juan de Vera, 
coming to demand for the Catholic kings the arrears of 
tribute due them from the Moor, " paused to regard its 
celebrated fountain " and " fell into discourse with the 
Moorish courtiers on certain mysteries of the Christian 
faith " ? So Washington Irving says, and so I once 
believed, with glowing heart and throbbing brow as I 
read how " this most Christian knight and discreet 
ambassador restrained himself within the limits of lofty 
gravity, leaning on the pommel of his sword and look- 

277 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

ing down with ineffable scorn upon the weak casuists 
around him. The quick and subtle Arabian witlings 
redoubled their light attacks on the stately Spaniard, 
but when one of them, of the race of the Abencerrages 
dared to question, with a sneer, the immaculate con- 
ception of the blessed Virgin, the Catholic knight could 
no longer restrain his ire. Elevating his voice of a sud- 
den, he told the infidel he lied, and raising his arm 
at the same time he smote him on the head with his 
sheathed sword. In an instant the Court of Lions glis- 
tened with the flash of arms," insomuch that the Ameri- 
can lady whom we saw writing a letter beside a friend 
sketching there must have been startled from her open- 
ing words, " I am sitting here with my portfolio on 
my knees in the beautiful Court of the Lions," and if 
Muley Aben Hassan had not " overheard the tumult 
and forbade all appeal to force, pronouncing the per- 
son of the ambassador sacred," she never could have 
gone on. 



I did not doubt the fact when I read of it under the 
level boughs of the beechen tree with J. W., sixty years 
ago, by the green woodland light of the primeval forest 
which hemmed our village in, and since I am well away 
from the Alhambra again I do not doubt it now. I 
doubt nothing that Irving says of the Alhambra ; he is 
the gentle genius of the place, and I could almost wish 
that I had paid the ten pesetas extra which the cus- 
todian demanded for showing his apartment in the pal- 
ace. On the ground the demand of two dollars seemed 
a gross extortion; yet it was not too much for a de- 
votion so rich as mine to have paid, and I advise other 
travelers to buy themselves off from a vain regret by 

278 




THE COURT OF THE LIONS 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

giving it. If ever a memory merited the right to levy 
tribute on all comers to the place it haunts, Washington 
Irving's is that memory. His Conquest of Granada is 
still the history which one would wish to read ; his Tales 
of the Alhambra embody fable and fact in just the 
right measure for the heart's desire in the presence of 
the monuments they verify or falsify. They belong to 
that strange age of romance which is now so almost 
pathetic and to which one cannot refuse his sympathy 
without sensible loss. But for the eager make-believe 
of that time we should still have to hoard up much 
rubbish which we can now leave aside, or accept without 
bothering to assay for the few grains of gold in it. 
Washington Irving had just the playful kindness which 
sufficed best to deal with the accumulations of his age ; 
if he does not forbid you to believe, he does not oblige 
you to disbelieve, and he has always a tolerant civility 
in his humor which comports best with the duty of tak- 
ing leniently a history impossible to take altogether 
seriously. Till the Spaniards had put an end to the 
Moorish misrule, with its ruthless despotism and bloody 
civil brawls, the Moors deserved to be conquered; it 
was not till their power was broken forever that they 
became truly heroic in their vain struggles and their 
unavailing sorrows. Then their pathetic resignation 
to persecution and exile lent dignity even to their ridicu- 
lous religion ; but it was of the first and not the second 
period that Irving had to treat. 



VI 

\The Alhambra is not so impressive by its glory or 

grandeur as by the unparalleled beauty of its place. 

If it is not very noble as an effect of art, the inspira- 

279 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TKAVELS 

tion of its founders is affirmed by their choice of an out- 
look which commands one of the most magnificent pano- 
ramas in the whole world. It would be useless to re- 
hearse the proofs by name. Think of far-off silver- 
crested summits and of a peopled plain stretching away 
from them out of eye-shot, dense first with roofs and 
domes and towers, and then freeing itself within fields 
and vineyards and orchards and forests to the vanish- 
ing-point of the perspective; think of steep and sud- 
den plunges into chasms at the foot of the palace walls, 
and one crooked stream stealing snakelike in their 
depths; think of whatever splendid impossible dramas 
of topography that you will, of a tremendous map out- 
stretched in colored relief, and you will perhaps have 
some notion of the prospect from the giddy windows 
of the Alhambra; and perhaps not. Of one thing we 
made memorably sure beyond the gulf of the Darro, 
and that was the famous gipsy quarter which the 
traveler visits at the risk of his life in order to have 
his fortune told. At the same moment we made sure 
that we should not go nearer it, for though we knew 
that it was insurpassably dirty as well as dangerous, 
we remembered so distinctly the loathsomeness of the 
gipsy quarter at Seville that we felt no desire to put 
it to the comparison. 

We preferred rather the bird's-eye study of the beau- 
tiful Greneralife which our outlook enabled us to make, 
and which we supplemented by a visit the next day. 
We preferred, after the Barmecide lunch at our hotel, 
taking the tram-car that noisily and more noisily 
clambers up and down, and descending into the town 
by it. The ascent is so steep that at a certain point 
the electric current no longer suffices, and the car bites 
into the line of cogs with its sort of powerful under- 
jaw and so arrives. Yet it is a kindly little vehicle, 

280 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

with a conductor so affectionately careful in transport- 
ing the stranger that I felt after a single day we should 
soon become brothers, or at least step-brothers. When- 
ever we left or took his car, after the beginning or end- 
ing of the cogway, he was alert to see that we made 
the right change to or from it, and that we no more 
overpaid than underpaid him. Such homely natures 
console the traveler for the thousand inhospitalities of 
travel, and bind races and religions together in spite of 
patriotism and piety. 

\We were going first to the Cartuja, and in the city, 
which we found curiously much more modern, after 
the Latin notion, than Seville, with freshly built apart- 
ment-houses and business blocks, we took a cab, not so 
modern as to be a taxicab, and drove through the quarter 
said to have been assigned to the Moors after the fall 
of Granada. The dust lay thick in the roadway where 
filthy children played, but in the sunny doorways good 
mothers of families crouched taking away the popular 
reproach of vermin by searching one another's heads. 
Men bestriding their donkeys rode fearlessly through 
the dust, and one cleanly-looking old peasant woman, 
who sat hers plumply cushioned and framed in with 
a chair-back and arms, showed a patience with the 
young trees planted for future shade along the desperate 
avenue which I could wish we had emulated. When 
we reached the entrance of the old Carthusian Convent, 
long since suppressed and its brothers exiled, a strong 
force of beggarmen waited for us, but a modest beggar- 
woman, old and sad, had withdrawn to the church door, 
where she shared in our impartial alms. We were 
admitted to the cloister, rather oddly, by a young girl, 
who went for one of the remaining monks to show us 
the church. He came with a newspaper (I hope of 
clerical politics) in his hand, and distracted himself 

281 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

from it only long enough to draw a curtain, or turn on 
a light, and point out a picture or statue from time 
to time. But he was visibly anxious to get back to it, 
and sped us more eagerly than he welcomed us in a 
church which upon the whole is richer in its peculiar 
treasures of painting, sculpture, especially in wood, 
costly marble, and precious stones than any other I re- 
member. According to my custom, I leave it to the 
guide-books to name these, and to the abounding critics 
of Spanish art to celebrate the pictures and statues ; 
it is enough for me that I have now forgotten them 
all except those scenes of the martyrdom inflicted by 
certain Protestants on members of the Carthusian 
brotherhood at the time when all sorts of Christians felt 
bound to correct the opinions of all other sorts by the 
crudest tortures they could invent. When the monk 
had put us to shame by the sight of these paintings 
(bad as their subjects), he put us out, letting his eyes 
fall back upon his newspaper before the door had well 
closed upon us. 

The beggarmen had waited in their places to give 
us another chance of meriting heaven ; and at the church 
door still crouched the old beggarwoman. I saw now 
that the imploring eyes she lifted were sightless, and I 
could not forbear another alms, and as I put my copper 
big-dog in her leathern palm I said, "Adios, mad re." 
Then happened something that I had long desired. I 
had heard and read that in Spain people always said 
at parting, " Go with God," but up to that moment 
nobody had said it to me, though I had lingeringlv 
given many the opportunity. Now, at my words and 
at the touch of my coin this old beggarwoman smiled 
beneficently and said, " Go with God," or, as she put 
it in her Spanish, " Vaya listed con Dios." Immediate- 
ly I ought to have pressed another coin in her palm, 

282 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

with a " Gracias, madre; muchas gracias," out of re- 
gard to the literary climax; but whether I really did 
so I cannot now remember ; I can only hope I did. 



VII 



V I think that it was while I was still in this high 
satisfaction that we went a drive in the promenade, 
which in all Spanish cities is the Alameda, except 
Seville, where it so deservedly is the Delicias. It was 
in every way a contrast to the road we had come from 
the Cartuja: an avenue of gardened paths and em- 
bowered driveways, where we hoped to join the rank 
and fashion of Granada in their afternoon's outing. 
But there was only one carriage besides our own with 
people in it, who looked no greater world than our- 
selves, and a little girl riding with her groom. On 
one hand were pretty villas, new-looking and neat, 
which I heard could sometimes be taken for the sum- 
mer at rents so low that I am glad I have forgotten 
the exact figures lest the reader should doubt my word. 
Nothing but the fact that the winter was then hanging 
over us from the Sierras prevented my taking one of 
them for the summer that had passed, the Granadan 
summer being notoriously the most delightful in the 
world. On the other hand stretched the wonderful 
Vega, which covers so many acres in history and ro- 
mance, and there, so near that we look down into them 
at times were " the silvery windings of the Xenil," 
which glides through so many descriptive passages of 
Irving's page ; only now, on account of recent rain, its 
windings were rather coppery. 

v At the hotel on the terrace under our balcony we 

found on our return a party of Spanish ladies and 
19 283 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

gentlemen taking tea, or whatever drink stood for it 
in their custom: no doubt chocolate; but it was at 
least the afternoon-tea hour. The women's clothes were 
just from Paris, and the men's from London, but their 
customs, I suppose, were national; the women sat on 
one side of the table and talked across it to the men, 
while they ate and drank, and then each sex grouped 
itself apart and talked to its kind, the women in those 
hardened vowels of a dialect from which the Anda- 
lusians for conversational purposes have eliminated all 
consonants. The sun was setting red and rayless, with 
a play of many lights and tints, over the landscape up 
to the snow-line on the Sierra. The town lay a stretch 
of gray roofs and white walls, intermixed with yellow 
poplars and black cypresses, and misted over with smoke 
from the chimneys of the sugar factories. . The moun- 
tains stood flat against the sky, purple with wide 
stretches of brown, and dark, slanting furrows. The 
light became lemon-yellow before nightfall, and then a 
dull crimson under pale violet. 

The twitter of the Spanish women was overborne at 
times by the voices of an American party whose pres- 
ence I was rather proud of as another American. They 
were all young men, and they were making an educa- 
tional tour of the world in the charge of a professor 
who saw to it that they learned as much of its languages 
and history and civilization as possible on the way. 
They ranged in their years from about fifteen to twenty 
and even more, and they were preparing for college, 
or doing what they could to repair the loss of university 
training before they took up the work of life. It seemed 
to me a charming notion, and charming the seriousness 
with which they were fulfilling it. They were not so 
serious in everything as to miss any incidental pleas- 
ure ; they had a large table to themselves in our Barme- 

284 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

cide banquet-hall, where they seemed always to be hav- 
ing a good time, and where once they celebrated the 
birthday of one of them with a gaiety which would 
have penetrated, if anything could, the shining chill of 
the hostelry. In the evening we heard them in the 
billiard-room below lifting their voices in the lays of 
our college muse, and waking to ecstasy the living piano 
in the strains of our national ragtime. They were 
never intrusively cheerful; one might remain, in spite 
of them, as dispirited as the place would have one ; but 
as far as the genius loci would let me, I liked them ; and 
so far as I made their acquaintance I thought that they 
were very intelligently carrying out the enterprise im- 
agined for them. 

VIII 

I wish now that I had known them well enough to 
ask them what they candidly thought of the city of 
which I felt the witchery under the dying day I have 
left celebrating for the moment in order to speak of 
them. It seems to me at this distance of time and 
space that I did not duly reflect that in places it was a 
city which smelled very badly and was almost as dirty 
as New York in others, and very ill paved. The worst 
places are in the older quarters, where the streets are 
very crooked and very narrow, so narrow that the tram- 
car can barely scrape through them. They are old 
enough to be streets belonging to the Moorish city, like 
many streets in Cordova and Seville, but no fond in- 
quiry of our guides could identify this lane or that 
alley as of Moorish origin. There is indeed a group of 
picturesque shops clearly faked to look Moorish, which 
the lover of that period may pin his faith to, and for a 
moment I did so, but upon second thought I un- 
pinned it. 

285 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

\We visited tins plated fragment of the old Moorish 
capital when we descended from onr hotel with a new 
guide to see the great, the stupendous cathedral, where 
the Catholic kings lie triumphantly entombed in the 
heart of their conquest. It is altogether unlike the 
other Spanish cathedrals of my knowledge ; for though 
the cathedral of Valladolid is of Renaissance archi- 
tecture in its austere simplicity, it is somehow even less 
like that of Granada than the Gothic fanes of Burgos 
or Toledo or Seville. All the detail at Granada is 
classicistic, but the whole is often of Gothic effect, es- 
pecially in the mass of those clustered Corinthian 
columns that lift its domes aloof on their prodigious 
bulk, huge as that of the grouped pillars in the York 
Minster. The white of the marble walls, the gold of 
altars, the colors of painted wooden sculpture form the 
tones of the place, subdued to one bizarre richness which 
I may as well leave first as last to the reader's fancy ; 
though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture 
that gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as 
we entered, and the music of stringed instruments and 
the shrill voices of choir-boys pierced the spaces here 
and there, but no more filled them than the immemo- 
rable plastic and pictorial facts: than a certain very 
lively bishop kneeling on his tomb and looking like 
George Washington ; or than a St. Jerome in the Desert, 
outwrinkling age, with his lion curled cozily up in his 
mantle; or than the colossal busts of Adam and Eve 
and the praying figures of Ferdinand and Isabel, rich- 
ly gilded in the exquisite temple forming the high altar ; 
or than the St. James on horseback, with, his horse's 
hoof planted on the throat of a Moor; or than the 
Blessed Virgins in jeweled crowns and stomachers and 
brocaded skirts ; or than that unsparing decapitation of 

John the Baptist bloodilv falling forward with his 

286 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

severed gullet thrusting at the spectator. Nothing has 
ever been too terrible in life for Spanish art to repre- 
sent ; it is as ruthlessly veracious as Russian literature ; 
and of all the painters and sculptors who .have portrayed 
the story of Christianity as a tale of torture and slaugh- 
ter, the Spaniards seem to have studied it closest from 
the fact; perhaps because for centuries the Inquisition 
lavished the fact upon them. 

\The supreme interest of the cathedral is, of course, 
the Royal Chapel, where in a sunken level Ferdinand 
and Isabel lie, with their poor mad daughter Joan and 
her idolized unfaithful husband Philip the Fair, whose 
body she bore about with her while she lived. The 
picture postal has these monuments in its keeping and 
can show them better than my pen, which falters also 
from the tremendous retablo of the chapel dense with 
the agonies of martyrdom and serene with the piety of 
the Catholic Kings kneeling placidly amid the horrors. 
If the picture postal will not supply these, or reproduce 
the many and many relics and memorials which abound 
there and in the sacristy — jewels and vestments and 
banners and draperies of the royal camp-altar — there 
is nothing for the reader but to go himself and see. It 
is richly worth his while, and if he cannot believe in a 
box which will be shown him as the box Isabel gave 
Columbus her jewels in merely because he has been 
shown a reliquary as her hand-glass, so much the worse 
for him. He will not then merit the company of a 
small choir-boy who efficiently opens the iron gate to 
the crypt and gives the custodian as good as he sends 
in back-talk and defiantly pockets the coppers he has 
earned. Much less will he deserve to witness the home- 
ly scene in an area outside of the Royal Chapel, where 
many milch goats are assembled, and when a customer 
comes, preferably a little erirl with a tin cup, one of the 

287 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

mothers of the flock is pinioned much against her will 
by a street boy volunteering for the office, and her head 
held tight while the goatherdess milks the measure full 
at the other end. 



IX 



Everywhere about the cathedral beggars lay in wait, 
and the neighboring streets were lively with bargains 
of prickly pears spread open on the ground by old 
women who did not care whether any one bought or 
not. There were also bargains in palmistry; and at 
one place a delightful humorist was selling clothing at 
auction. He allured the bidders by having his left 
hand dressed as a puppet and holding a sparkling dia- 
logue with it; when it did not respond to his liking he 
beat it with his right hand, and every now and then he 
rang a little bell. He had a pleased crowd about him 
in the sunny square; but it seemed to me that all the 
newer part of Granada was lively with commerce in 
ample, tram-trodden streets which gave the shops, larger 
than any we had seen out of Madrid, a chance uncom- 
mon in the narrow ways of other Spanish cities. Yet 
when I went to get money on my letter of credit, I 
found the bank withdrawn from the modernity in a 
seclusion reached through a lovely patio. We were 
seated in old-fashioned welcome, such as used to honor 
a banker's customers in Venice, and all comers bowed 
and bade us good day. The bankers had no such ques- 
tion of the different signatures as vexed those of Val- 
ladolid, and after no more delay than due ceremony 
demanded, I went away with both my money and my 
letter, courteously seen to the door. 

The guide, to whom we had fallen in the absence of 
our French-speaking guide of the day before, spoke a lit* 

288 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

tie English, and he seemed to grow in sympathetic in- 
telligence as the morning passed. He made our sight- 
seeing include visits to the church of St. John of God, 
and the church of San Geronimo, which was built by 
Gonsalvo de Cordova, the Great Captain, and remains 
now a memorial to him. We rang at the door, and 
after long delay a woman came and let us into an in- 
terior stranger ever than her being there as custodian. 
It was frescoed from floor to ceiling everywhere, except 
the places of the altars now kept by the painted retablos 
and the tombs and the statues of the various saints and 
heroes. The retablo of the high altar is almost more 
beautiful than wonderful, but the chief glory of the 
place is in the kneeling figures of the Great Captain 
and his wife, one on either side of the altar, and farther 
away the effigies of his famous companions-in-arms, and 
on the walls above their heraldic blazons and his. The 
church was unfinished when the Great Captain died in 
the displeasure of his ungrateful king, and its sump- 
tuous completion testifies to the devotion of his 
wife and her taste in choosing the best artists for the 
work. 

vl have still the sense of a noonday quiet that lingered 
with us after we left this church and which seemed to 
go with us to the Hospital of St. John of God, founded, 
with other hospitals, by the pious Portuguese, who, 
after a life of good works, took this name on his well- 
merited canonization. The hospital is the monument of 
his devotion to good works, and is full of every manner 
of religious curio. I cannot remember to have seen so 
many relics under one roof, bones of both holy men and 
women, with idols of the heathen brought from Portu- 
guese possessions in the East which are now faded from 
the map, as well as the body of St. John of God shrined 

in silver in the midst of all. 

289 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 



I do not know why I should have brought away from 
these two places a peacefulness of mind such as seldom 
follows a visit to show-places, but the fact is so; per- 
haps it was because we drove to and from them, and 
were not so tired as footworn sight-seers are, or so re- 
bellious. One who had seen not only the body of St. 
John of God> but his cane with a whistle in it to warn 
the charitable of his coming and attune their minds 
to alms-giving, and the straw basket in which he col- 
lected food for the poor, now preserved under an em- 
broidered satin covering, and an autograph letter of his 
framed in glass and silver, might even have been re- 
freshed by his experience. At any rate, we were so far 
from tired that after luncheon we walked to the Garden 
of the Generalife, and then walked all over it. The 
afternoon was of the very mood for such a visit, and 
we passed it there in these walks and bowers, and the 
black cypress aisles, and the trees and vines yellow- 
ing to the fall of their leaves. The melancholy laugh 
of water chasing down the steep channels and gurgling 
through the stone rails of stairways was everywhere, 
and its dim smile gleamed from pools and tanks. In 
the court where it stretched in a long basin an English 
girl was painting and another girl was sewing, to whom 
I now tardily offer my thanks for adding to the charm 
of the place. Not many other people were there to 
dispute our afternoon's ownership. I count a peasant 
family, the women in black shawls and the men wear- 
ing wide, black sashes, rather as our guests than as 
strangers; and I am often there still with no sense of 
molestation. Even the reader who does not conceive 
of a garden being less flowers and shrubs than foun- 

290 




Copyright by H. C. White Co. 

LOOKING NORTHWEST FROM THE GENERALIFE OVER GRANADA 



TO AND IN GKANADA 

tains and pavilions and porches and borders of box and 
walls of clipped evergreens, will scarcely follow me to 
the Generalife or outstay me there. 

The place is probably dense with history and suf- 
focating with association, but I prefer to leave all that 
to the imagination Where my own ignorance found it. 
A painter had told me once of his spending a summer in 
it, and he showed some beautiful pieces of color in proof, 
but otherwise I came to it with a blank surface on which 
it might photograph itself without blurring any earlier 
record. This, perhaps, is why I love so much to dwell 
there on that never-ending afternoon of late October. 
It was long past the hour of its summer bloom, but the 
autumnal air was enriching it beyond the dreams of 
avarice with the gold, which prevails in the Spanish 
landscape wherever the green is gone, and we could 
look out of its yellowing bowers over a landscape im- 
measurable in beauty. Of course, we tried to master 
the facts of the Generalife's past, but we really did not 
care for them and scarcely believed that Charles V. 
had doubted the sincerity of the converted Moor who 
had it from Ferdinand of Aragon, and so withheld it 
from his heirs for four generations until they could 
ripen to a genuine Christianity at Genoa, whither they 
withdrew and became the patrician family now its pro- 
prietors. The arms of this family decorate the roof 
and walls of the colonnaded belvedere from which you 
look out over the city and the plain and the mountains ; 
and there are remnants of Moorish decoration in many 
places, but otherwise the Generalife is now as Christian 
as the noble Pallavicini who possess it. There 
were plenty of flower-beds, box-bordered, but there 
were no flowers in them; the flowers preferred stand- 
ing about in tall pots. There was an arbor overhung 

with black forgotten grapes before the keeper's door 

291 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

and in the corner of it dangled ropes of fire - red 
peppers. 

This detail is what, with written help, I remember of 
the Generalife, but no loveliness of it shall fade from 
my soul. From its embowered and many-fountained 
height it looks over to the Alhambra, dull red, and the 
city wall climbing the opposite slope across the Darro 
to a church on the hilltop which was once a mosque. 
The precipice to which the garden clings plunges sheer 
to the river-bed with a downlook insurpassably thrill- 
ing; but the best view of the city is from the flowery 
walk that runs along the side of the Alcazaba, which 
was once a fortress and is now a garden, long forgetful 
of its office of defending the Alhambra palace. From 
this terrace Granada looks worthy of her place in his- 
tory and romance. We visited the Alcazaba after the 
Generalife, and were very critical, but I must own the 
supremacy of this prospect. I should not mind owning 
its supremacy among all the prospects in the world. 



XI 



•Meanwhile our shining hotel had begun to thrill with 

something besides the cold which nightly pierced it from 

the snowy Sierra. This was the excitement pending 

from an event promised the next day, which was the 

production of a drama in verse, of peculiar and intense 

interest for Granada, where the scene of it was laid 

in the Alhambra at one of the highest moments of its 

history, and the persons were some of those dearest to 

its romance. Not only the company to perform it (of 

course the first company in Spain) had been in the 

hotel overnight, and the ladies of it had gleamed and 

gloomed through the cold corridors, but the poet had 

292 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

been conspicuous at dinner, with his wife, young and 
beautiful and blond, and powdered so white that her 
blondness was of quite a violet cast. There was not so 
much a question of whether we should take tickets as 
whether we could get them, but for this the powerful in- 
fluence of our guide availed, and he got tickets provi- 
dentially given up in the morning for a price so ex- 
orbitant I should be ashamed to confess it. They were 
for the afternoon performance, and at three o'clock we 
went with the rest of the gay and great world of Gra- 
nada to the principal theater. 

N The Latin conception of a theater is of something 
rather more barnlike than ours, but this theater was of 
a sufficiently handsome presence, and when we had been 
carried into it by the physical pressure exerted upon 
us by the crowd at the entrance we found its vastness 
already thronged. The seats in the orchestra were 
mostly taken ; the gallery under the roof was loud with 
the impatience for the play which the auditors there 
testified by cries and whistlings and stampings until 
the curtain lifted ; the tiers of boxes rising all round the 
theater were filled with family parties. The fathers and 
mothers sat in front with the children between them of 
all ages down to babies in their nurses' arms. These 
made themselves perfectly at home, in one case reaching 
over the edge of the box and clawing the hair of a gentle- 
man standing below and openly enjoying the joke. The 
friendly equality of the prevailing spirit was expressed 
in the presence of the family servants at the back of 
the family boxes, from which the latest fashions showed 
themselves here and there, as well as the belated local 
versions of them. In the orchestra the men had prompt- 
ly lighted their cigars and the air was blue with smoke. 
Friends found one another, to their joyful amaze, not 
having met since morning; and especially young girls 

293 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

were enraptured to recognize young men ; one girl shook 
hands twice with a young man, and gurgled with 
laughter as long as he stood near her. 
\ As a lifelong lover of the drama and a boyish friend 
of Granadan romance, I ought to have cared more for 
the play than the people who had come to it, but I did 
not. The play was unintentionally amusing enough; 
but after listening for two hours to the monotonous 
cadences of the speeches which the persons of it recited 
to one another, while the ladies of the Moorish world 
took as public a part in its events as if they had been 
so many American Christians, we came away. We had 
already enjoyed the first entr'acte, when the men all rose 
and went out, or lighted fresh cigars and went to talk 
with the Paris hats and plumes or the Spanish mantillas 
and high combs in the boxes. The curtain had scarcely 
fallen when the author of the play was called before it 
and applauded by the generous, the madly generous, 
spectators. He stood bowing and bowing on tiptoe, as 
if the wings of his rapture lifted him to them and would 
presently fly away with him. He could not drink deep 
enough of the delicious draught, put brimming to his 
lips, and the divine intoxication must have lasted him 
through the night, for after breakfast the next morn- 
ing I met him in our common corridor at the hotel 
smiling to himself, and when I could not forbear smil- 
ing in return he smiled more; he beamed, he glowed 
upon me as if I were a crowded house still cheering him 
to the echo. It was a beautiful moment and I realized 
even better than the afternoon before what it was to be 
a young poet and a young Spanish poet, and to have 
had a first play given for the first time in the city of 
Granada, where the morning papers glowed with praise 
so ardent that the print all but smoked with it. We 

were alone in the corridor where we met, and our eyes 

294 



TO AND IN GRANADA 

confessed us kindred spirits, and I hope he understood 
me better than if I had taken him in my arms and 
kissed him on both cheeks. 

\I really had no time for that; I was on my way 
down-stairs to witness the farewell scene between the 
leading lady and the large group of young Granadans 
who had come up to see her off. When she came out 
to the carriage with her husband, by a delicate refine- 
ment of homage they cheered him, and left him to 
deliver their devotion to her, which she acknowledged 
only with a smile. But not so the leading lady's lady's- 
maid, when her turn came to bid good-by from our 
omnibus window to the assembled upper servants of the 
hotel. She put her head out and said in a voice hoarse 
with excitement and good-fellowship, " Adios, homhres!" 
.(" Good-by, men!"), and vanished with us from their 
applausive presence. 

vWith us, I say, for we, too, were leaving Granada 
in rain which was snow on the Sierra and so cold that 
we might well have seemed leaving Greenland. The 
brave mules which had so gallantly, under the lash of 
the running foot-boy beside them, galloped uphill with 
us the moonlight night of our coming, now felt their 
anxious way down in the dismal drizzle of that last 
morning, and brought us at last to the plaza before the 
station. It was a wide puddle where I thought our 
craft should have floundered, but it made its way to 
the door, and left us dry shod within and glad to be 
quitting the city of my young dreams. 



XII 

THE SUKPKISES OF RONDA 

The rain that pelted sharply into the puddle before 
the station at Granada was snow on the Sierra, and the 
snow that fell farther and farther down the mountain- 
sides resolved itself over the Vega into a fog as white 
and almost as cold. Half-way across the storied and 
fabled plain the rain stopped and the fog lifted, and 
then we saw by day, as we had already seen by night, 
how the Vega was plentifully dotted with white cottages 
amid breadths of wheat-land where the peasants were 
plowing. Here and there were fields of Indian corn, 
and in a certain place there was a small vineyard; in 
one of the middle distances there spread a forest of 
Lombardy poplars, yellow as gold, and there was abun- 
dance of this autumn coloring in the landscape, which 
grew lonelier as we began to mount from the level. 
Olives, of course, abounded, and there were oak woods 
and clumps of wild cherry trees. The towns were far 
from the stations, which we reached at the rate of per- 
haps two miles an hour as we approached the top of 
the hills ; and we might have got out and walked with- 
out fear of being left behind by our train, which made 
long stops, as if to get its breath for another climb. 
Before this the sole companion of our journey, whom 
we decided to be a landed proprietor coming out in his 
riding-gear to inspect his possessions, had left us, but 
at the first station after our descent began other pas- 

296 



THE SUEPRISES OF RONDA 

sengers got in, with a captain of Civil Guards among 
them, very loquacious and very courteous, and much 
deferred to by the rest of us. At Bobadilla, where 
again we had tea with hot goat's milk in it, we changed 
cars, and from that on we had the company of a Rock- 
Scorpion pair whose name was beautifully Italian and 
whose speech was beautifully English, as the speech of 
those born at Gibraltar should rightfully be. 



\It was quite dark at Ronda when our omnibus drove 
into the gardened grounds of one of those admirable 
inns which an English company is building in Spain, 
and put us down at the door of the office, where a typical 
English manageress and her assistant appointed us 
pleasant rooms and had fires kindled in them while 
we dined. There were already fires in the pleasant 
reading-room, which did not diffuse a heat too great 
for health but imparted to the eye a sense of warmth 
such as we had experienced nowhere else in Spain. 
Over all was spread a quiet and quieting British in- 
fluence; outside of the office the nature of the service 
was Spanish, but the character of it was English ; the 
Spanish waiters spoke English, and they looked English 
in dress and manner; superficially the chambermaid 
was as English as one could have found her in the 
United Kingdom, but at heart you could see she was 
as absolutely and instinctively a Spanish camerera as 
any in a hotel of Madrid or Seville. In the atmosphere 
of insularity the few Spanish guests were scarcely dis- 
tinguishable from Anglo-Saxons, though a group of 
magnificent girls at a middle table, quelled by the 

duenna-like correctness of their mother, looked with 

297 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

their exaggerated hair and eves like Spanish ladies 
made up for English parts in a play. 

\We had our breakfast in the reading-room where all 
the rest were breakfasting and trying not to see that 
they were keeping one another from the fire. It was 
very cold, for Honda is high in the mountains which 
hem it round and tower far above it. We had already 
had our first glimpse of their summits from our own 
windows, but it was from the terrace outside the read- 
ing-room that we felt their grandeur most after we had 
drunk our coffee: we could scarcely have borne it be- 
fore. In their presence, we could not realize at once 
that Ronda itself was a mountain, a mere mighty mass 
of rock, cleft in twain, with chasmal depths where we 
saw pygmy men and mules creeping out upon the valley 
that stretched upward to the foot of the Sierra. Why 
there should ever have been a town built there in the 
prehistoric beginning, except that the rock was so im- 
possible to take, and why it should have therefore been 
taken by that series of invaders who pervaded all Spain 
— by the Phoenicians, by the Carthaginians, bv the Ro- 
mans, by the Goths, by the Moors, by the Christians, 
and after many centuries by the Trench, and finally 
by the Spaniards again — it would not be easy to say. 
Among its many conquerors, the Moors left their im- 
press upon it, though here as often as elsewhere in 
Spain their impress is sometimes merely a decoration 
of earlier Roman work. There remains a Roman bridge 
which the Moors did not make over into the likeness 
of their architecture, but built a bridge of their own 
which also remains and may be seen from the mag- 
nificent structure with which the Spaniards Have arched 
the abyss where the river rushes writhing and foaming 
through the gorge three hundred feet below. There on 
the steps that lead from the brink, tHe eye of pity may 

298 



THE SURPRISES OF RONDA 

still see the files of Christian captives bringing water up 
to their Moslem masters; but as one cannot help them 
now, even by the wildest throe, it is as well to give a 
vain regret to the architect of the Spanish bridge, who 
fell to his death from its parapet, and then push on 
to the market hard bj. 



ii 



•n You have probably come to see that market because 
vou have read in vour guide-books that the region round 
about Ronda is one of the richest in Spain for grapes 
and peaches and medlars and melons and other fruits 
whose names melt in the mouth. If you do not find 
in the market the abundance you expect of its pictur- 
esqueness you must blame the lateness of the season, 
and go visit the bull-ring, one of the most famous in 
the world, for Ronda is not less noted for its toreros 
and aficionados than for its vineyards and orchards. 
But here again the season will have been before you 
with the glory of those corridas which you have still 
hoped not to witness but to turn from as an example 
to the natives before the first horse is disemboweled 
or the first bull slain, or even the first handerillero 
tossed over the barrier. 

\The bull-ring seemed fast shut to the public when 
we approached it, but we found ourselves smilingly 
welcomed to the interior by the kindly mother in charge. 
She made us free of the whole vast place, where eight 
thousand people could witness in perfect comfort the 
dying agonies of beasts and men, but especially she 
showed us the chamber over the gate, full of bull- 
fighting properties: the pikes, the little barbed pennons, 
the long sword by which the bull suffers and dies, as 
well as the cumbrous saddles and bridles and spears 
20 299 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

for the unhappy horses and their riders. She was 
especially compassionate of the horses, and she had 
apparently no pleasure in any of the cruel things, 
though she was not critical of the sport. The King of 
Spain is president of the Ronda bull-fighting associa- 
tion, and she took us into the royal box, which is the 
worthier to be seen because under it the bulls are 
shunted and shouted into the ring from the pen where 
they have been kept in the dark. Before we escaped 
her husband sold us some very vivid postal cards repre- 
senting the sport ; so that with the help of a large black 
cat holding the center of the ring, we felt that we had 
seen as much of a bull-fight as we could reasonably 
wish. 

\ We were seeing the wonders of the city in the guid- 
ance of a charming boy whom we had found in wait 
for us at the gate of the hotel garden when we came 
out. He offered his services in the best English he 
had, and he had enough of it to match my Spanish 
word for word throughout the morning. He led us from 
the bull-ring to the church known to few visitors, I be- 
lieve, where the last male descendant of Montezuma 
lies entombed, under a fit inscription, and then through 
the Plaza past the college of Montezuma, probably 
named for this heir of the Aztec empire. I do not 
know why the poor prince should have come to die 
in Ronda, but there are many things in Ronda which 
I could not explain: especially why a certain fruit is 
sold by an old woman on the bridge. Its berries are 
threaded on a straw and look like the most luscious 
strawberries but taste like turpentine, though they may 
be avoided under the name of madronos. But on no 
account would I have the reader avoid the Church of 
Santa Maria Mayor. It is so dark within that he will 

not see the finely carved choir seats without the help 

300 



THE SUEPEISES OF RONDA 

of matches, or the pictures at all ; but it is worth realiz- 
ing, as one presently may, that the hither part of the 
church is a tolerably perfect mosque of Moorish archi- 
tecture, through which you must pass to the Renaissance 
temple of the Christian faith. 

^sear by is the Casa de Mondragon which he should 
as little miss if he has any pleasure in houses with two 
patios perching on the gardened brink of a precipice 
and overlooking one of the most beautiful valleys in 
the whole world, with donkey-trains climbing up from 
it over the face of the cliff. The garden is as charming 
as red geraniums and blue cabbages can make a garden, 
and the house is fascinatingly quaint and unutterably 
Spanish, with the inner patio furnished in bright- 
colored cushions and wicker chairs, and looked into by 
a brown wooden gallery. A stately lemon-colored elder- 
ly woman followed us silently about, and the whole 
place was pervaded by a smell that was impossible at 
the time and now seems incredible. 



in 



I here hesitate before a little adventure which I would 

not make too much of nor yet minify: it seems to me 

so gentle and winning. I had long meant to buy a 

donkey, and I thought I could make no fitter beginning 

to this end than by buying a donkey's head-stall in the 

country where donkeys are more respected and more 

brilliantly accoutred than anywhere else in the whole 

earth. When I ventured to suggest my notion, or call 

it dream, to our young guide, he instantly imagined it 

in its full beauty, and he led us directly to a shop in the 

principal street which for the richness and variety of 

the coloring in its display might have been a florist's 

301 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

shop. Donkeys' trappings in brilliant yellow, Vermil- 
lion, and magenta hung from the walls, and head-stalls, 
gorgeously woven and embroidered, dangled from the 
roof. Among them and under them the donkeys' 
harness-maker sat at his work, a short, brown, hand- 
some man with eyes that seemed the more prominent 
because of his close-shaven head. We chose a head- 
stall of such splendor that no heart could have resisted 
it, and while he sewed to it the twine muzzle which 
Spanish donkeys wear on their noses for the protection 
of the public, our guide expatiated upon us, and said, 
among other things to our credit, that we were from 
America and were going to take the head-stall back 
with us. 

The harness-maker lifted his head alertly. " Where, 
in America ?" and we answered for ourselves, " From 
New York." 

Then the harness-maker rose and went to an inner 
doorway and called through it something that brought 
out a comely, motherly woman as alert as himself. She 
verified our statement for herself, and having paved 
the way firmly for her next question she asked, " Do 
you know the Escuela Mann ?" 

As well as our surprise would let us, we said that we 
knew the Mann School, both where and what it was. 

She waited with a sort of rapturous patience before 
saying, " My son, our eldest son, was educated at the 
Escuela Mann, to be a teacher, and now he is a pro- 
fessor in the Commercial College in Puerto Rico." 

If our joint interest in this did not satisfy her ex- 
pectation I for my part can never forgive myself; 
certainly T tried to put as much passion into my interest 
as I could, when she added that his education at the 
Escuela Mann was without cost to him. "Bv this time, 
in fact, I was so proud of the Escuela Mann that I 

302 






THE SURPRISES OF RONDA 

could not forbear proclaiming that a member of my 
own family, no less than the father of the grandson 
for whose potential donkey I was buying that head- 
stall, was one of the architects of the Escuela Mann 
building. 

— She now vanished within, and when she came out 
she brought her daughter, a gentle young girl who sat 
down and smiled upon us through the rest of the inter- 
view. She brought also an armful of books, the Span- 
ish-English Ollendorff which her son had used in study- 
ing our language, his dictionary, and the copy-book 
where he had written his exercises, with two photo- 
graphs of him, not yet too Americanized; and she 
showed us not only how correctly but how beautifully 
his exercises were done. If I did not admire these 
enough, again I cannot forgive myself, but she seemed 
satisfied with what I did, and she talked on about 
him, not too loquaciously, but lovingly and lovably 
as a mother should, and proudly as the mother of such 
a boy should, though without vainglory; I have for- 
gotten to say that she had a certain distinction of face, 
and was appropriately dressed in black. By this time 
we felt that a head-stall for such a donkey as I was 
going to buy was not enough to get of such people, and 
I added a piece of embroidered leather such as goes 
in Spain on the front of a donkey's saddle ; if we oould 
not use it so, in final defect of the donkey, we could 
put it on a veranda chair. The saddler gave it at so 
low a price that we perceived he must have tacitly 
abated something from the usual demand, and when 
we did not try to beat him down, his wife went again 
into that inner room and came out with an iron-holder 
of scarlet flannel backed with canvas, and fringed with 
magenta, and richly inwrought with a Moorish design 

in white, yellow, green, and purple* I say Moorish, 

303 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

because one must say something, but if it was a pattern 
of her own invention the gift was the more precious 
when she bestowed it on the sister of one of the archi- 
tects of the Escuela Mann. That led to more conversa- 
tion about the Escuela Mann, and about the graduate of 
it who was now a professor in Puerto Rico, and we all 
grew such friends, and so proud of one another, and of 
the country so wide open to the talents without cost to 
them, that when I asked her if she would not sometime 
be going to America, her husband answered almost 
fiercely in his determination, " I am going when I have 
learned English!" and to prove that this was no idle 
boast, he pronounced some words of our language at 
random, but very well. We parted in a glow of recip- 
rocal esteem and I still think of that quarter-hour as 
one of my happiest; and whatever others may say, I 
say that to have done such a favor to one Spanish family 
as the Escuela Mann had been the means of our nation 
doing this one was a greater thing than to have taken 
Cuba from Spain and bought the Philippines when we 
had seized them already and had led the Filipinos to 
believe that we meant to give their islands to them. 



IV 

Suddenly, on the way home to our very English 
hotel, the air of Ronda seemed charged with English. 
We were already used to the English of our young 
guide, which so far as it went, went firmly and cour- 
ageously after forethought and reflection for each sen- 
tence, but we were not quite prepared for the English 
of two polite youths who lifted their hats as they passed 
us and said, " Good afternoon. " The general English 
lasted quite overnight and far into the next day when 

304 



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^y*i 18.^^1 




3BJj£ ' 


W -V m, «- 


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it 

1 





LOOKING ACROSS THE NEW BRIDGE (800 FEET HIGH) OVER THE GUADA- 
LAVIAR GORGE, RONDA 



THE SUKPKISES OF RONDA 

we found several natives prepared to try it on us in the 
pretty Alameda, and learned from one, who proved to 
be the teacher of it in the public school, that there were 
some twenty boys studying it there : heaven knows why, 
but the English hotel and its success may have suggested 
it to them as a means of prosperity. The students seem 
each prepared to guide strangers through Honda, but 
sometimes they fail of strangers. That was the case 
with the pathetic young hunchback whom we met in 
Alameda, and who owned that he had guided none that 
day. In view of this and as a prophylactic against a 
course of bad luck, I made so bold as to ask if I might 
venture to repair the loss of the peseta which he would 
otherwise have earned. He smiled wanly, and then 
with the countenance of the teacher, he submitted and 
thanked me in English which I can cordially recom- 
mend to strangers knowing no Spanish. 
' All this was at the end of another morning when we 
had set out with the purpose of seeing the rest of Honda 
for ourselves. We chose a back street parallel to the 
great thoroughfare leading to the new bridge, and of a 
squalor which we might have imagined but had not. 
The dwellers in the decent-looking houses did not seem 
to mind the sights and scents of their street, but these 
revolted us, and we made haste out of it into the avenue 
where the greater world of Ronda was strolling or 
standing about, but preferably standing about. In the 
midst of it, at the entrance of the new bridge we heard 
ourselves civilly saluted and recognized with some hesi- 
tation the donkey's harness-maker who, in his Sunday 
dress and with his hat on, was not just the work-day 
presence we knew. He held by the hand a pretty boy 
of eleven years, whom he introduced as his second son, 
self-destined to follow the elder brother to America, 

and duly take up the profession of teaching in Puerto 

305 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

Rico after experiencing the advantages of the Escuela 
Mann. His father said that he already knew some 
English, and he proposed that the boy should go about 
with us and practise it, and after polite demur and 
insistence the child came with us, to our great pleasure. 
He bore himself with fit gravity, in his cap and long 
linen pinafore as he went before us, and we were per- 
sonally proud of his fine, long face and his serious eyes, 
dark and darkened yet more by their long lashes. He 
knew the way to just such a book store as we wanted, 
where the lady behind the desk knew him and willingly 
promised to get me some books in the Andalusian dia- 
lect, and send them to our hotel by him at half past 
twelve. Naturally she did not do so, but he came to 
report her failure to get them. We had offered to pay 
him for his trouble, but he forbade us, and when we 
had overcome his scruple he brought the money back, 
and we had our trouble over again to make him keep it. 
To this hour I do not know how we ever brought our- 
selves to part with him; perhaps it was his promise 
of coming to America next year that prevailed with 
us ; his brother was returning on a visit and then they 
were going back together. 



V Our search for literature in Ronda was not wholly a 

failure. At another bookstore, I found one of those 

local histories which I was always vainly trying for 

in other Spanish towns, and I can praise the Hisforia 

de Ronda por Federico Lozano Gutierrez as well done, 

and telling all that one would ask to know about that 

famous city. The author's picture is on the cover, and 

with his charming letter dedicating the book to his 

father goes far to win the reader's heart. Outside the 

306 



THE SURPRISES OF RONDA 

bookseller's a blind minstrel was playing the guitar 
in the care of a small boy who was selling, not sing- 
ing, the ballads. They celebrated the prowess of Spain 
in recent wars, and it would not be praising them too 
highly to say that they seemed such as might have been 
written by a drum-major. Not that I think less of them 
for that reason, or that I think I need humble myself 
greatly to the historian of Konda for associating their 
purchase with that of his excellent little book. If I 
had bought some of the blind minstrel's almanacs and 
jest-books I might indeed apologize, but ballads are an- 
other thing. 

After we left the bookseller's, our little guide asked 
us if we would like to see a church, and we said that we 
would, and he took us into a white and gold interior, 
with altar splendors out of proportion to its simplicity, 
all in the charge of a boy no older than himself, who 
was presently joined by two other contemporaries. 
They followed us gravely about, and we felt that it 
was an even thing between ourselves and the church 
as objects of interest equally ignored by Baedeker. 
Then we thought we would go home and proposed going 
by the Alameda. 

That is a beautiful place, where one may walk a 

good deal, and drive, rather less, but not sit down much 

unless indeed one likes being swarmed upon by the 

beggars who have a just priority of the benches. There 

seemed at first to be nobody walking in the Alameda 

except a gentleman pacing to and from the handsome 

modern house at the first corner, which our guide said 

was this cavalier's house. He interested me beyond any 

reason I could give ; he looked as if he might represent 

the highest society in Ronda, but did not find it an 

adequate occupation, and might well have interests and 

ambitions beyond it. I make him my excuses for in- 

307 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

trading my print upon hhn, but I would give untold 
gold if I had it to know all about such a man in such 
a city, walking up and down under the embrowning 
trees and shrinking flowers of its Alameda, on a Sunday 
morning like that. 

Our guide led us to the back gate of our hotel garden, 
where we found ourselves in the company of several 
other students of English. There was our charming 
young guide of the day before and there was that sad 
hunchback already mentioned, and there was their 
teacher who seemed so few years older and master of 
so little more English. Together we looked into the 
valley into which the vision makes its prodigious plunge 
at Ronda before lifting again over the fertile plain to 
the amphitheater of its mighty mountains ; and there we 
took leave of that nice boy who would not follow us 
into our garden because, as he showed us by the sign, 
it was forbidden to any but guests. He said he was 
going into the country with his family for the after- 
noon, and with some difficulty he owned that he ex- 
pected to play there; it was truly an admission hard 
to make for a boy of his gravity. We shook hands at 
parting with him, and with our yesterday's guide, and 
with the teacher and with the hunchback; they all 
offered it in the bond of our common English; and 
then we felt that we had parted with much, very much 
of what was sweetest and best in Ronda. 



VI 



The day had been so lovely till now that we said we 

would stay many days in Ronda, and we loitered in 

the sun admiring the garden ; the young landlady among 

iier flowers said that all the soil had to be brought for 

308 



THE SURPRISES OF RONDA 

it in carts and panniers, and this made us admire its 
autumn blaze the more. That afternoon we had planned 
taking our tea on the terrace for the advantage of look- 
ing at the sunset light on the mountains, but suddenly 
great black clouds blotted it out. Then we lost courage ; 
it appeared to us that it would be both brighter and 
warmer by the sea and that near Gibraltar we could 
more effectually prevent our steamer from getting away 
to New York without us. We called for our bill, and 
after luncheon the head waiter who brought it said that 
the large black cat which had just made friends with 
us always woke him if he slept late in the morning 
and followed him into the town like a dog when he 
walked there. 
\It was hard to part with a cat like that, but it was 
hard to part with anything in Honda. Yet we made 
the break, and instead of ruining over the precipitous 
face of the rock where the city stands, as we might 
have expected, we glided smoothly down the long grade 
into the storm-swept lowlands sloping to the sea. They 
grew more fertile as we descended and after we had 
left a mountain valley where the mist hung grayest and 
chillest, we suddenly burst into a region of mellow 
fruitfulness, where the haze was all luminous, and 
where the oranges hung gold and green upon the trees, 
and the women brought grapes and peaches and apples 
to the train. The towns seemed to welcome us south- 
ward and the woods we knew instantly to be of cork 
trees, with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza under their 
branches anywhere we chose to look. 

Otherwise, the journey was without those incidents 
which have so often rendered these pages thrilling. 
Just before we left Ronda a couple, self-evidently the 
domestics of a good family, got into our first-class car- 
riage though they had unquestionably only third-class 

309 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

tickets. They had the good family's dog with them, and 
after an unintelligible appeal to us and to the young 
English couple in the other corner, they remained and 
banished any misgivings they had by cheerful dialogue. 
The dog coiled himself down at my feet and put his 
nose close to my ankles, so that without rousing his 
resentment I could not express in Spanish my indigna- 
tion at what I felt to be an outrageous intrusion : ser- 
vants, we all are, but in traveling first class one must 
draw the line at dogs. I said as much to the English 
couple, but they silently refused any part in the demon- 
stration. Presently the conductor came out to the win- 
dow for our fares, and he made the Spanish pair observe 
that they had third-class tickets and their dog had none. 
He told them they must get out, but they noted to him 
the fact that none of us had objected +o their company, 
or their dog's, and they all remained, referring them- 
selves to us for sympathy when the conductor left. 
After the next station the same thing happened with 
little change; the conductor was perhaps firmer and 
they rather more yielding in their disobedience. Once 
more after a stop the conductor appeared and told them 
that when the train halted again, they and their dog 
must certainly get out. Then sbmething surprising 
happened: they really got out, and very amiably; per- 
haps it was the place where they had always meant to 
get out; but it was a great triumph for the railway 
company, which owed nothing in the way of countenance 
to the young English couple; they had done nothing 
but lunch from their basket and bottle. We ourselves 
arrived safely soon after nightfall at Algeciras, just 
in time for dinner in the comfortable mother - hotel 
whose pretty daughter had made us so much at home 
in Honda. 



XIII 
ALGECIRAS AKD TARIFA 

When we walked out on the terrace of our hotel at 
Algeciras after breakfast, the first morning, we were 
greeted by the familiar form of the Rock of Gibraltar 
still advertising, as we had seen it three years before, 
a well-known American insurance company. It rose 
beyond five miles of land-locked water, which we were 
to cross every other day for three weeks on many idle 
and anxious errands, until we sailed from it at last for 
New York. 

Meanwhile Algeciras was altogether delightful not 
only because of our Kate-Greenaway hotel, embowered 
in ten or twelve acres of gardened ground, with walks 
going and coming under its palms and eucalyptuses, 
beside beds of geraniums and past trellises of roses and 
jasmines, all in the keeping of a captive stork which 
was apt unexpectedly to meet the stranger and clap its 
formidable mandibles at him, and then hop away with 
half-lifted wings. Algeciras had other claims which it 
urged day after day more winningly upon us as the 
last place where we should feel the charm of Spain 
unbroken in the tradition which reaches from modern 
fact far back into antique fable. I will not follow it 
beyond the historic clue, for I think the reader ought 
to be satisfied with knowing that the Moors held it as 
early as the seven hundreds and as late as the thirteen 
hundreds, when the Christians definitively recaptured 

311 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

it and their kings became kings of Algeciras as well 
as kings of Spain, and remain so to this day. At the 
end of the eighteenth century one of these kings made 
it his lookout for watching the movements of the in- 
imical English fleets, and then Algeciras slumbered 
again, haunted only by " a deep dream of peace " till 
the European diplomats, rather unexpectedly assisted 
by an American envoy, made it the scene of their fa- 
mous conference for settling the Morocco question in 
1906. 



I think this is my whole duty to the political inter- 
est of Algeciras, and until I come to our excursion to 
Tarifa I am going to give myself altogether to our 
pleasure in the place unvexed by any event of his- 
tory. I disdain even to note that the Moors took the 
city again from the Christians, after twenty-five years, 
and demolished it, for I prefer to remember it as it has 
been rebuilt and lies white by its bay, a series of red- 
tiled levels of roof with a few church-towers topping 
them. It is a pretty place, and remarkably clean, in- 
habited mostly by beggars, with a minority of in- 
dustrial, commercial, and professional citizens, who 
live in agreeable little houses, with patios open to the 
passer, and with balconies overhanging him. It has 
of course a bull-ring, enviously closed during our stay, 
and it has one of the pleasantest Alamedas and the best 
swept in Spain, where some nice boys are playing in 
the afternoon sun, and a gentleman, coming out of one 
of the villas bordering on it, is courteously interested 
in the two strangers whom he sees sitting on a bench 
beside the walk, with the leaves of the plane trees drop- 
ping round them in the still air. 

312 



ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA 

The Alameda is quite at the thither end of Algeciras. 
At the end next our hotel, but with the intervention of 
a space of cliff, topped and faced by summer cottages 
and gardens, is the station with a train usually ready 
to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do 
not know which, and with the usual company of freight- 
cars idling about, empty or laden with sheets of cork, 
as indifferent to them as if they were so much mere 
pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently attractive 
hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the 
marine and military leisure of Gibraltar, " The Picnic 
Restaurant," and " The Cabin Tea Room," where no 
doubt there is something to be had beside sandwiches 
and tea. Here also is the pier for the Gibraltar boats, 
with the Spanish custom-house which their passengers 
must pass through and have their packages and per- 
sons searched for contraband. One heard of wild 
caprices on the part of the inspectors in levying duties 
which were sometimes made to pass the prime cost of 
the goods in Gibraltar. I myself onl\ carried in books 
which after the first few declarations were recognized 
as of no imaginable value and passed with a genial 
tolerance, as a sort of joke, by officers whom I saw 
feeling the persons of their fellow-Spaniards unspar- 
ingly over. 

We had, if anything, less business really in Algeciras 
than in Gibraltar, but we went into the town nearly 
every afternoon, and wantonly bought things. By this 
means we proved that the Andalusian shopmen had not 
the proud phlegm of the Castilians across their counters. 
In the principal dry-goods store two salesmen rivaled 
each other in showing us politeness, and sent home our 
small purchases as promptly as if we had done them 
a favor in buying. We were indeed the wonder of our 
fellow-customers who were not buying; but our pride 

313 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

was brought down in the little shop where the pro- 
prietress was too much concerned in cooking her dinner 
(it smelled delicious) to mind our wish for a very cheap 
green vase, inestimably Spanish after we got it home. 
However, in another shop where the lady was ironing 
her week's wash on the counter, a lady friend who was 
making her an afternoon call got such a vase down for 
us and transacted the negotiation out of pure good will 
for both parties to it. 

Parallel with the railway was a channel where small 
fishing-craft lay, and where a leisurely dredging-ma- 
chine was stirring up the depths in a stench so dire that 
I wonder we do not smell it across the Atlantic. Over 
this channel a bridge led into the town, and offered the 
convenient support of its parapet to the crowd of spec- 
tators who wished to inhale that powerful odor at their 
ease, and who hung there throughout the working-day ; 
the working-day of the dredging-machine, that is. The 
population was so much absorbed in this that when we 
first crossed into ';he town, we found no beggar children 
even, though there were a few blind beggarmen, but 
so few that a boy who had one of them in charge was 
obliged to leave off smelling the river and run and 
hunt him up for us. Other boys were busy in street- 
sweeping and b-r-r-r-r-ing to the donkeys that carried 
off the sweepings in panniers; and in the fine large 
plaza before the principal church of Algeciras there 
was a boy who had plainly nothing but mischief to do, 
though he did not molest us farther than to ask in Eng- 
lish, " Want to see the cathedral ?" Then he went his 
way swiftly and we went into the church, which we 
found very whitewashed and very Moorish in archi- 
tecture, but very Spanish in the Blessed Virgins on 
most of the altars, dressed in brocades and jewels. A 

sacristan was brushing and dusting the place, but he 

314 



ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA 

did not bother us, and we went freely about among the 
tall candles standing on the floor as well as on the altars, 
and bearing each a placard attached with black rib- 
bon, and dedicated in black letters on silver " To the 
Repose of This or That " one among the dead. 

The meaning was evident enough, but we sought 
something further of the druggist at the corner, who 
did his best for us in such English as he had. It was 
not quite the English of Ronda; but he praised his 
grammar while he owned that his vocabulary was in 
decay from want of practise. In fact, he well-nigh 
committed us to the purchase of one of those votive 
candles, which he understood we wished to buy; he all 
but sent to the sacristan to get one. There were several 
onlookers, as there always are in Latin pharmacies, and 
there was a sad young mother waiting for medicine with 
a sick baby in her arms. The druggist said it had 
fever of the stomach ; he seemed proud of the fact, and 
some talk passed between him and the bystanders which 
related to it. We asked if he had any of the quince 
jelly which we had learned to like in Seville, but he 
could only refer us to the confectioner's on the other 
corner. Here was not indeed quince jelly, but we 
compromised on quince cheese, as the English call it; 
and we bought several boxes of it to take to America, 
which I am sorry to say moulded before our voyage 
began, and had to be thrown away. Near this confec- 
tioner's was a booth where boiled sweet-potatoes were 
sold, with oranges and joints of sugar-cane, and, spitted 
on straws, that terrible fruit of the strawberry tree 
which we had tasted at Ronda without wishing to taste 
it ever again. Yet there was a boy boldly buying sev- 
eral straws of it and chancing the intoxication which 
over-indulgence in it is said to cause. Whether the 
excitement of these events was too great or not, we 

21 315 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

found ourselves suddenly unwilling, if not unable, to 
walk back to our hotel, and we took a cab of the three 
standing in the plaza. One was without a horse, an- 
other without a driver, but the third had both, as in 
some sort of riddle, and we had no sooner taken it than 
a horse was put into the first and a driver ran out and 
got on the box of the second, as if that was the answer 
to the riddle. 



ii 



It was then too late for them to share our custom, 
but I am not sure that it was not one of these very 
horses or drivers whom we got another day for our 
drive about the town and its suburbs, and an excursion 
to a section of the Moorish aqueduct which remains 
after a thousand years. You can see it at a distance, 
but no horse or driver in our employ could ever find 
the way to it ; in fact, it seemed to vanish on approach, 
and we were always bringing up in our hotel gardens 
without having got to it ; I do not know what we should 
have done with it if we had. We were not able to do 
anything definite with the new villas built or building 
around Algeciras, though they looked very livable, and 
seemed proof of a prosperity in the place for which I 
can give no reason except the great natural beauty of 
the nearer neighborhood, and the magnificence of the 
farther, mountain-walled and skyed over with a Sep- 
tember blue in November. I think it would be a good 
place to spend the winter if one liked each day to be 
exactly like every other. I do not know whether it is 
inhabited by English people from Gibraltar, where there 
are of course those resources of sport and society which 
an English colony always carries with it. 

The popular amusements of Algeciras in the off 
316 



ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA 

seacon for bull-feasts did not readily lend themselves 
to observance. Chiefly we noted two young men with 
a graphophone on wheels which, being pushed about, 
wheezed out the latest songs to the acceptance of large 
crowds. We ourselves amused a large crowd when one 
of us attempted to sketch the yellow f a§ade of a church 
so small that it seemed all facade; and another day 
when that one of us who held the coppers, commonly 
kept sacred to blind beggars, delighted an innumerable 
multitude of mendicants having their eyesight per- 
fect. They were most of them in the vigor of youth, 
and they were waiting on a certain street for the month- 
ly dole with which a resident of Algeciras may buy 
immunity for all the other days of the month. They 
instantly recognized in. the stranger a fraudulent tax- 
dodger, and when he attempted tardily to purchase 
immunity they poured upon him; in front, behind, on 
both sides, all round, they boiled up and bubbled about 
him; and the exhaustion of his riches alone saved him 
alive. It must have been a wonderful spectacle, and 
I do not suppose the like of it was ever seen in Algeciras 
before. It was a triumph over charity, and left quite 
out of comparison the organized onsets of the infant 
gang which always beset the way to the hotel under a 
leader whose battle-cry, at once a demand and a prom- 
ise, was " Penny-go-way, Penny-go-way !" 
v Along that pleasant shore bare - legged fishermen 
spread their nets, and going and coming by the Gibral- 
tar boats were sometimes white-hosed, brown-cloaked, 
white-turbaned Moors, who occasionally wore Christian 
boots, but otherwise looked just such Moslems as landed 
at Algeciras in the eighth century ; people do not change 
much in Africa. They were probably hucksters from 
the Moorish market in Gibraltar, where they had given 

their geese and turkeys the holiday they were taking 

317 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

themselves. They were handsome men, tall and vigor- 
ous, but they did not win me to sympathy with their 
architecture or religion, and I am not sure but, if there 
had been any concerted movement against them on the 
landing at Algeciras, I should have joined in driving 
them out of Spain. As it was I made as much Africa 
as I could of them in defect of crossing to Tangier, 
which we had firmly meant to do, but which we for- 
bore doing till the plague had ceased to rage there. By 
this time the boat which touched at Tangier on the way 
to Cadiz stopped going to Cadiz, and if we could not 
go to Cadiz we did not care for going to Tangier. It 
was something like this, if not quite like it, and it ended 
in our seeing Africa only from the southernmost verge 
of Europe at Tarifa. At that little distance across it 
looked dazzlingly white, like the cotton vestments of 
those Moorish marketmen, but probably would have 
been no cleaner on closer approach. 



in 



As a matter of fact, we were very near not going 
even to Tarifa, though we had promised ourselves going 
from the first. But it was very charming to linger 
in the civilization of that hotel ; to wander through its 
garden paths in the afternoon after a forenoon's writ- 
ing and inhale the keen aromatic odors of the euca- 
lyptus, and when the day waned to have tea at an iron 
table on the seaward terrace. Or if we went to Gi- 
braltar, it was interesting to wonder why we had gone, 
and to be so glad of getting back, and after dinner 
joining a pleasant international group in the long 
reading-room with the hearth-fires at either end which, 

if you got near them, were so comforting against the 

318 



ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA 

evening chill. Sometimes the pleasure of the time 
was heightened by the rain pattering on the glass 
roof of the patio, where in the afternoon a bulky 
Spanish mother sat mute beside her basket of laces 
which you could buy if you would, but need not 
if you would rather not; in either case she smiled 
placidly. 

At last we did get together courage enough to drive 
twelve miles over the hills to Tarifa, but this courage 
was pieced out of the fragments of the courage we had 
lost for going to Cadiz by the public automobile which 
runs daily from Algeciras. The road after you passed 
Tarifa was so bad that those who had endured it said 
nobody could endure it, and in such a case I was sure 
I could not, but now I am sorry I did not venture, for 
since then I have motored over some of the roads in the 
state of Maine and lived. If people in Maine had that 
Spanish road as far as Tarifa they would think it the 
superb Massachusetts state road gone astray, and it 
would be thought a good road anywhere, with the prom- 
ise of being better when the young eucalyptus trees 
planted every few yards along it grew big enough to 
shade it. But we were glad of as much sun as we 
could get on the brisk November morning when we 
drove out of the hotel garden and began the long climb, 
with little intervals of level and even of lapse. We 
started at ten o'clock, and it was not too late in that 
land of anomalous hours to meet peasants on their mules 
and donkeys bringing loads of stuff to market in Alge- 
ciras. Men were plowing with many yoke of oxen in 
the wheat-fields; elsewhere there were green pastures 
with herds of horses grazing in them, an abundance 
of brown pigs, and flocks of sheep with small lambs 
plaintively bleating. The pretty white farmhouses, 

named each after a favorite saint, and gathering at 

319 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TRAVELS 

times into villages, had grapes and figs and pome- 
granates in their gardens; and when we left them and 
climbed higher, we began passing through long stretches 
of cork woods. 

The trees grew wild, sometimes sturdily like our oaks, 
and sometimes gnarled and twisted like our seaside 
cedars, and in every state of excoriation. The bark is 
taken from them each seventh year, and it begins to 
be taken long before the first seventh. The tender 
saplings and the superannuated shell wasting to its fall 
yield alike their bark, which is stripped from the roots 
to the highest boughs. Where they have been flayed 
recently they look literally as if they were left bleed- 
ing, for the sap turns a red color; but with time this 
changes to brown, and the bark begins to renew itself 
and grows again till the next seventh year. Upon the 
whole the cork-wood forest is not cheerful, and I would 
rather frequent it in the pages of Don Quixote than out ; 
though if the trees do not mind being barked it is mere 
sentimentality in me to pity them. 

\ The country grew lonelier and drearier as we 
mounted, and the wind blew colder over the fields 
blotched with that sort of ground-palm which lays 
waste so much land in southern Spain. When we de- 
scended the winding road from the summit we came 
in sight of the sea with Africa clearly visible beyond, 
and we did not lose sight of it again. Sometimes we 
met soldiers possibly looking out for smugglers but, let 
us hope, not molesting them ; and once we met a brace 
of the all-respected Civil Guards, marching shoulder to 
shoulder, with their cloaks swinging free and their car- 
bines on their arms, severe, serene, silent. Now and 
then a mounted wayfarer came toward us looking like 
a landed proprietor in his own equipment and that of 

his steed, and there were peasant women solidly perched 

320 



ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA 

on donkeys, and draped in long black cloaks and hooded 
in white kerchiefs. 

IV 

' The landscape softened again, with tilled fields and 
gardened spaces around the cottages, and now we had 
Tarifa always in sight, a stretch of white walls beside 
the bine sea with an effect of vicinity which it was 
very long in realizing. We had meant when we reached 
the town at last to choose which fonda we should stop 
at for our luncheon, but our driver chose the Fonda 
de Villanueva outside the town wall, and I do not be- 
lieve we could have chosen better if he had let us. 
He really put us down across the way at the venta 
where he was going to bait his horses; and in what 
might well have seemed the custody of a little police- 
man with a sword at his side, we were conducted to 
the fonda and shown up into the very neat icy cold 
parlor where a young girl with a yellow flower in her 
hair received us. We were chill and stiff from our 
drive and we hoped for something warmer from the 
dining-room, which we perceived must face southward, 
and must be full of sun. But we reckoned without 
the ideal of the girl with the yellow flower in her hair : 
in the little saloon, shining round with glazed tiles 
where we next found ourselves, the sun had been care- 
fully screened and scarcely pierced the scrim shades. 
But this was the worst, this was all that was bad, in that 
fonda. When the breakfast or the luncheon, or what- 
ever corresponds in our usage to the Spanish almuerzo, 
began to come, it seemed as if it never would stop. An 
original but admirable omelette with potatoes and bacon 
in it was followed by fried fish flavored with saffron. 

Then there was brought in fried kid with a dish of 

321 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

kidneys; more fried fish came after, and then boiled 
beef, with a dessert of small cakes. Of course there 
was wine, as much as you would, such as it was, and 
several sorts of fruit. I am sorry to have forgotten 
how little all this cost, but at a venture I will say forty 
cents, or fifty at the outside ; and so great kindness and 
good will Went with it from the family who cooked 
it in the next room and served it with such cordial 
insistence that I think it was worth quite the larger 
sum. It would not have been polite to note how much 
of this superabundance was consumed by the three 
Spanish gentlemen who had so courteously saluted us 
in sitting down at table with us. I only know that they 
made us the conventional acknowledgment in refusing 
our conventional offer of some things we had brought 
with us from our hotel to eat in the event of famine 
at Tarifa. 



When we had come at last to the last course, we 
turned our thoughts somewhat anxiously to the ques- 
tion of a guide for the town which we felt so little able 
to explore without one ; and it seemed to me that I had 
better ask the policeman who had brought us to our 
fonda. He was sitting at the head of the stairs where 
we had left him, and so far from being baffled by my 
problem, he instantly solved it by offering himself to be 
our guide. Perhaps it was a profession which he mere- 
ly joined to his civic function, but it was as if we were 
taken into custody when he put himself in charge of us 
and led us to the objects of interest which I cannot 
say Tarifa abounds in. That is, if you leave out of 
the count the irregular, to and fro, up and down, narrow 

lanes, passing the blank walls of low houses, and glimps- 

322 



ALGECIEAS AND TARIFA 

ing leafy and flowery patios through open gates, and 
suddenly expanding into broader streets and unex- 
pected plazas, with shops and cafes and churches in 
them. 

v Tarif a is perhaps the quaintest town left in the 
world, either in or out of Spain, but whether it is 
more Moorish than parts of Cordova or Seville I could 
not say. It is at least pre-eminent in a feature of the 
women's costume which you are promised at the first 
mention of the place, and which is said to be a sur- 
vival of the Moslem civilization. Of course we were 
eager for it, and when we came into the first wide street, 
there at the principal corner three women were stand- 
ing, just as advertised, with black skirts caught up 
from their waists over their heads and held before their 
faces so that only one eye could look out at the strangers. 
It was like the women's costume at Chiozza on the 
Venetian lagoon, but there it is not claimed for Moor- 
ish and here it was authenticated by being black. 
" Moorish ladies," our guide proudly proclaimed them 
in his scanty English, but I suspect they were Spanish ; 
if they were really Orientals, they followed us with 
those eyes single as daringly as if they had been of our 
own Christian Occident. 

The event was so perfect in its way that it seemed 
as if our guiding policeman might have especially or- 
dered it ; but this could not have really been, and was 
no such effect of his office as the immunity from beggars 
which we enjoyed in his charge. The worst boy in 
Tarifa (we did not identify him) dared not approach 
for a big-dog or a little, and we were safe from the 
boldest blind man, the hardiest hag, however pock- 
marked. The lanes and the streets and the plazas were 
clean as though our guide had them newly swept for 
us, and the plaza of the principal church (no guide- 

323 



FAMILIAK SPANISH TKAVELS 

book remembers its name) is perhaps the cleanest in 
all Spain. 



VI 



The chnrch itself we found very clean, and of an 
interest quite beyond the promise of the rather bare 
outside. A painted window above the door cast a glare 
of fresh red and blue over the interior, and over the 
comfortably matted floor ; and there was a quite freshly 
carved and gilded chapel which the pleasant youth sup- 
plementing our policeman for the time said was done 
by artists still living in Tarifa. The edifice was of 
a very flamboyant Gothic, with clusters of slender 
columns and a vault brilliantly swirled over with deco- 
rations of the effect of peacock feathers. But above 
all there was on a small side altar a figure of the Child 
Jesus dressed in the corduroy suit and felt hat of a 
Spanish shepherd, with a silver crook in one hand and 
leading a toy lamb by a string in the other. Our young 
guide took the image down for us to look at, and showed 
its shepherd's dress with peculiar satisfaction; and 
then he left it on the ground while he went to show 
us something else. When we came back we found two 
small boys playing with the Child, putting its hat off 
and on, and feeling of its clothes. Our guide took it 
from them, not unkindly, and put it back on the altar ; 
and whether the reader will agree with me or not, I 
must own that I did not find the incident irreverent or 
without a certain touchingness, as if those children 
and He were all of one family and they were at home 
with Him there. 

Rather suddenly, after we left the church, by way 
of one of those unexpectedly expanding lanes, we found 
ourselves on the shore of the purple sea where the 

324 



ALGECIRAS AND TAKIFA 

Moors first triumphed over the Goths twelve hundred 
years before, and five centuries later the Spaniards beat 
them back from their attempt to reconquer the city. 
There were barracks, empty of the Spanish soldiers 
gone to fight the same old battle of the Moors on their 
own ground in Africa, and there was the castle which 
Alfonso Perez de Guzman held against them in 1292, 
and made the scene of one of those acts of self-devotion 
which the heart of this time has scarcely strength for. 
The Moors when they had vainly summoned him to 
yield brought out his son whom they held captive, and 
threatened to kill him. Guzman drew his knife and 
flung it down to them, and they slew the boy, but Tarif a 
was saved. His king decreed that thereafter the father 
should be known as Guzman the Good, and the fact 
has gone into a ballad, but the name somehow does 
not seem quite to fit, and one wishes that the father 
had not won it that way. 

\We were glad to go away from the dreadful place, 
though Tangier was so plain across the strait, and we 
were almost in Africa there, and hard by, in the waters 
tossing free, the great battle of Trafalgar was fought. 
From the fountains of m'y far youth, when I first heard 
of Guzman's dreadful heroism, I endeavored to pump 
up an adequate emotion; I succeeded somewhat better 
with Nelson and his pathetic prayer of " Kiss me, 
Hardy," as he lay dying on his bloody deck ; but I did 
not much triumph with either, and I was grateful when 
our good little policeman comfortably questioned the 
deed of Guzman which he said some doubted, though 
he took us to the very spot where the Moors had par- 
leyed with Guzman, and showed us the tablet over the 
castle gate affirming the fact. 
v We liked far better the pretty Alameda rising in 

terraces from it with beds of flowers beside the prome- 

325 



FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS 

nade, and boys playing up and down, and old men sit- 
ting in the sun, and trying to ignore the wind that 
blew over them too freshly for us. Our policeman 
confessed that there was nothing more worth seeing in 
Tarifa, and we entreated of him the favor of showing 
us a shop where we could buy a Cordovese hat; a hat 
which we had seen flourishing on the heads of all men 
in Cordova and Seville and Granada and Ronda, and 
had always forborne to buy because we could get it 
anywhere ; and now we were almost leaving Spain with- 
out it. We wanted one brown in color, as well as stiff 
and flat of brim, and slightly conical in form ; and our 
policeman promptly imagined it, and took us to a shop 
abounding solely in hats, and especially in Cordoveses. 
The proprietor came out wiping his mouth from an 
inner room, where he had left his family visibly at their 
almuerzo; and then we were desolated together that he 
should only have Cordoveses that were black. But pass- 
ing a patio where there was a poinsettia in brilliant 
bloom against the wall, we found ourselves in a variety 
store where there were Cordoveses of all colors ; and 
we chose one of the right brown, with the picture of a 
beautiful Spanish girl, wearing a pink shawl, inside 
the crown which was fluted round in green and red 
ribbon. Seven pesetas was the monstrous asking price, 
but we beat it down to five and a half, and then came 
a trying moment: we could not carry a Cordovese in 
tissue-paper through the streets of Tarifa, but could we 
ask our guide, who was also our armed escort, to carry 
it? He simplified the situation by taking it himself 
and bearing it back to the fonda as proudly as if he had 
not also worn a sword at his side ; and we parted there 
in a kindness which I should like to think he shared 

equally with us. 

326 



ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA 

He was practically the last of those Spaniards who 
were always winning my heart (save in the bank at 
Valladolid where they must have misunderstood me), 
and whom I remember with tenderness for their court- 
esy and amiability. In little things and large, I found 
the Spaniards everywhere what I heard a Piedmontese 
commercial traveler say of them in Venice fifty years 
ago : " They are the honestest people in Europe." In 
Italy I never began to see the cruelty to animals which 
English tourists report, and in Spain I saw none at all. 
If the reader asks how with this gentleness, this civility 
and integrity, the Spaniards have contrived to build 
up their repute for cruelty, treachery, mendacity, and 
every atrocity; how with their love of bull-feasts and 
the suffering to man and brute which these involve, 
they should yet seem so kind to both, I answer frankly, 
I do not know. I do not know how the Americans are 
reputed good and just and law-abiding, although they 
often shoot one another, and upon mere suspicion rather 
often burn negroes alive. 



THE END 



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